It was Mr. Gillespie who replied:
"No. I wish more than one listener; let the lawyer stay."
I was only too happy to remain. Wet as I was, I felt anxious to hear what this man so singled out by Hope had to say in explanation of his relations to the wretched woman he now acknowledged to be his wife.
He seemed in haste to make them.
"Seven years ago this fall," he began, "I met this woman, then a girl."
"Wait!" put in Mr. Gryce; "there is a point which must first be settled." And, advancing to the cot guarded so jealously by the man before him, he laid his hand upon the coverlet. "You will allow me," he said firmly, as with a gentle enough touch he drew it softly aside.
"How came this woman—pardon me, how came Mrs. Gillespie to die thus suddenly?"
The unhappy husband, after his first recoil of outraged feeling, forced himself into a recognition of the detective's rights, and, with apparent resignation, rejoined:
"I should have come to that in time. She died, as you can readily perceive, from exposure. Driven from Mother Merry's miserable quarters by some terror for which, perhaps, she had no name, she wandered in and out among the docks for two wretched days and nights, often dragging her feet through the ooze of the river, so that her garments were never dry and are not so yet. At last she came here, where once before she had found shelter in a biting storm. Here! But it is a better place than the wharves, and I am glad God guided her to even so poor a refuge. She was raving with fever when she came straggling into the room below. But after the warmth struck her and she had tasted something, she came to herself again, and then—and then she sent for me."
He paused. I did not yet understand him or the circumstances which made this situation possible, but a strange reverence began to mingle with my wonder,—not for the man—I could not feel that yet; but for a love which could infuse such feeling into the lightest allusion he made to this beloved, if wretched waif.