Theodore Winthrop

“ She longed to fling herself on her knees before her daughter, to bury her face in Lucy’s lap, and there, with tears and agony, cry out: —
“O my child! pity me, do not hate me, for the lie I have been. Ah! you do not know the misery of wearing an undetected falsehood in the heart! You do not know the torture of hypocrisy. You do not know how miserably base it is to be loved for what you are not, — to be trusted as a true and loyal heart, when every moment of such false pretence is another film of falsehood over the deep-seated lie. ”

“ Shall she sit there and shame you?” — so the Furies whispered and shouted. And the woman replied within herself: “Am I not stabbing her? See, here is my hired bravo, my future son-in-law, the very Honorable Major Kerr, — le bel homme! ”