All this occupied fully an hour, for near a hundred letters were
glanced at, and some twenty had been closely read. The truth now
shone clear upon the acute mind of Judith, so far as her own birth
and that of Hetty were concerned. She sickened at the conviction,
and for the moment the rest of the world seemed to be cut off from
her, and she had now additional reasons for wishing to pass the
remainder of her life on the lake, where she had already seen so
many bright and so many sorrowing days.
There yet remained more letters to examine. Judith found these
were a correspondence between her mother and Thomas Hovey. The
originals of both parties were carefully arranged, letter and answer,
side by side; and they told the early history of the connection
between the ill-assorted pair far more plainly than Judith wished
to learn it. Her mother made the advances towards a marriage, to
the surprise, not to say horror of her daughter, and she actually
found a relief when she discovered traces of what struck her as
insanity - or a morbid desperation, bordering on that dire calamity
- in the earlier letters of that ill-fated woman. The answers of
Hovey were coarse and illiterate, though they manifested a sufficient
desire to obtain the hand of a woman of singular personal attractions,
and whose great error he was willing to overlook for the advantage
of possessing one every way so much his superior, and who it also
appeared was not altogether destitute of money.
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