to giving me all the information she could.
I succeeded easily in my research, as far as it depended on these two persons. I found that the memorandum of my mother's having taken you out of the convent, by the name of Celestina de Mornay, remained; and I found, with emotions on which I must not dwell, that there was another memorandum of expences, for the little English child, received at the request of Madame de P—. Such is the literal sense of the French words. Who then was this Madame de P—? An old nun, who had lived in the house above five and twenty years, and who was the only person who recollected any circumstances of your reception, told me that she well remembered that this Madame de P—came from Bayonne, or some

part of the country in the neighbourhood of that town; and that she was an intimate friend of the then Abbess, and her name, of which only the initials were expressed in the memorandum, was le Marquise de Pellatier.
I enquired of the old nun, if she knew on what ground it was you were represented as an English child? she replied, that she knew no more than that when first you were received under the care of the Superior, you were said to be the child of English parents, or at least that one of your parents was of that nation: but that soon afterwards this was, by the Abbess's authority, contradicted; it was forbidden to be mentioned in the community; and it was ordered that you should from that time be spoken of as Mademoiselle de Mornay; while intimations were given that you were a relation of her own; born of a concealed marriage; and that your father being dead, and your mother

married to another person, you were to be considered as belonging only to the community in which you were destined to pass your life.
Ah! Celestina! what food was here for those corrosive conjectures which preyed on my heart. Having exhausted however, every kind of information which it was here possible to procure, I set out for Bayonne; where some of the family at least of Madame de Pellatier were, I understood, to be found.
She had herself been dead some years. I met, however, with her son, a gay young man of four or five and twenty, from whom I could obtain nothing but a general confession that his mother probably had, from the general tenor of her life, occasion in more than one instance to exercise the secrecy and kind offices of her friends, and very probably obliged them