From your affectionate
“Oscar.
“Mrs. Oscar Otwell
(Address unknown).”
Folding the letter, and handing it to the officers, together with Oscar’s card and photograph—all of which would prove indispensable for their future use—Mrs. Otwell quietly moved again to the breakfast room, and, strange to say, finished her meal in silence.
Then turning to him in whose service she was, intimated her intention to sail for England when the missing body would be recovered, which she meant to bury in Greenwood Cemetery. She lingered on in eager expectation of casting one final look at her husband, but week after week died away without any sign of it being forthcoming, and all hope being fled, Mrs. Otwell resolved to lose no further time in returning to her home of nativity, in order to obey the last instructions from the hand of Oscar Otwell, from whom she was reluctantly obliged to part in the manner described.
Another side the picture of futurity presented for the anxious mother, and that was to try and obtain an interview with her son, who at this period must be a boy of some fifteen summers. Having everything in readiness for her journey to her native land, Mrs. Otwell left Dunraven Hall amidst torrents of sympathy and warm expressions from every member of the family; and it was when driving past Afton Lake for the last time on her way to the deck of the “Delwyn” that the crushed widow of Oscar Otwell and legal wife of Sir John Dunfern was made to taste of the unlimited sorrow of her sad career.
There she was, a stranger in a foreign land—an outcast to the society she shone so brilliantly amongst during years that were now no more, the fostered orphan, the adopted daughter of heiressed nothing, the wife of devotional distinction, the illegal partner of crutchy poverty, and the penniless widow of undeniable woe.
She was not even granted the ghostly pleasure of viewing her lover’s lifeless body, that would have ended her thoughts relative to him, at least for a time, but as matters stood encircled in doubt, there was nothing left save trouble and anxiety for her whose futurity must ever be shaded.