A MOMENTOUS COMMUNICATION 319 perhaps obtain a small pension, but this assuredly would not be sufficient to maintain you and the boy in comfort. I know that you said at the time that possibly you could add to it by teaching. Should this be so you may be able to remain in Egypty when the boy grows up he will obtain employment of some sort here.

But should you be unsuccessful in this direction, I do not see what you could do. Were you to go to England with the child, what chance would you hare of obtaining employment there without friends or references'-I am frightened at the prospect. I know that were you alone you would do anything rather than apply to my people, but you have the child to think of, and, painful as it would be to you, it yet seems to me the best thing that could be done. At any rate I enclose you three letters to my brother, father, and sisters. , I have no legal claim on any of them, but I certainly have a moral claim on my brother. It is he who has impoverished the estate, so that even had I not quarrelled with my father there could never, after provision had been made for my sisters, have been anything to come to me.

1 do not ask you to humiliate yourself by delivering these letters personally. I would advise you to post them from Cairo, enclosing in each a note saying how I fell, and that you are fulfilling my instructions by sending the letter I wrote before leaving you. It may be that you will receive no reply. In that case whatever happens to you and the child, you will have nothing to reproach yourself for. Possibly my father may have succeeded to the title, and iffor no other reason, he may then be willing to grant you an allowance on condition that you do not return to England, as he would know that it would be nothing short of a scandal that the wife of one of his sons was trying to earn her bread in this country. Above all, dear, 1 ask you not to destroy these letters. You may at first scorn the idea of appealing for help, but the time might come, as it came to us in London, when you feel that fate is too strong for you, and that you can struggle no longer. Then you might regret, for the sake of the child, that you had not sent these letters.