“I will not. I am sorry I said so much.”
“Dear me, this is the most wonderful thing that ever occurred. It seems to me to be altogether impossible. I deemed you dead—I felt assured of it; and now in the hour of trouble and travail you rise up in judgment against me—you whom I have not seen for nearly twenty years.”
“Don’t imagine I am likely to trouble you,” cried Bill; “I’d sooner cut off this hand than harm a hair of your head. When I leave this house it will be for good and for all, and you may rest assured that, as far as you are concerned, Bill Rawton, the gipsy, will never cross your path. He’ll change his name, and no one will ever know that he is crawling about on the face of the earth. No, no, Mrs. Bourne; you have nothing to fear from me. This meeting is an accidental one, but our ways—our paths of life—are too far asunder for you to be in any fear of being troubled with my presence. I’ll go this very moment if you wish it.”
There was a tone of sincerity in Bill’s manner which went far towards reassuring the doctor’s wife.
“You speak fairly enough, and I have no reason to doubt you; indeed, in earlier days I was taught by experience that you were mindful of me, and never that I can remember thwarted me in one solitary instance.”
“You told me the last time we met that you were not happy. Is that so?” inquired the gipsy.
“Alas! yes. Happy! I am supremely miserable, more wretched than I can possibly tell you.”
“And the reason for this?” he inquired. “You are the mistress of this establishment, are the wife of a physician of good repute.”
“Good repute!” she exclaimed, with bitterness.
“Well, I should imagine so; and I hope I am not mistaken?”