XXXVI

to hide from Charley that I had been crying, and I constrained myself to think of every sacred obligation that there was upon me to be careful and collected. It was not a little while before I could succeed or could even restrain bursts of grief, but after an hour or so I was better and felt that I might return. I went home very slowly and told Charley, whom I found at the gate looking for me, that I had been tempted to extend my walk after Lady Dedlock had left me and that I was overtired and would lie down. Safe in my own room, I read the letter. I clearly derived from it⁠—and that was much then⁠—that I had not been abandoned by my mother. Her elder and only sister, the godmother of my childhood, discovering signs of life in me when I had been laid aside as dead, had in her stern sense of duty, with no desire or willingness that I should live, reared me in rigid secrecy and had never again beheld my mother’s face from within a few hours of my birth. So strangely did I hold my place in this world that until within a short time back I had never, to my own mother’s knowledge, breathed⁠—had been buried⁠—had never been endowed with life⁠—had never borne a name. When she had first seen me in the church she had been startled and had thought of what would have been like me if it had ever lived, and had lived on, but that was all then.