I did not know why then, nor did I know why later; but know why now.

However, I let this premonition pass and engaged myself to him, and the one happy moment I knew was when I told my mother what I had done, and saw her joy and heard the hope with which she impulsively cried: 'It is something I can write your uncle.

Who knows?
Perhaps he may forgive me my marriage when he hears that my child is going to do so well!' Poor mother! she had felt the glamour of my lover's good looks and cleverness much more than I had.

She saw from indications to which I was blind that I was going to marry a man of mark, and was much more interested in the possible reply she might receive to the letter with which she had broken the silence of years between herself and her family than in the marriage itself.
"But days passed, a week, and no answer came.

My uncle--the only relative remaining in which we could hope to awaken any interest, or rather, the only one whose interest would be worth awakening, he being a millionaire and unmarried--declined, it appeared, any communication with one so entirely removed from his sympathies; and the disappointment of it broke my mother's heart.