“I will not. Good-by! Send Miss Hanson to tell me if any new trouble should menace you. I will make it my own.”
He held her hand for one minute in his own; he saw the tears in her eyes, and then turned away without another word.
CHAPTER XLV.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END.
“Great events from little causes spring.”
Kenelm Eyrle preferred walking through the woods home; he wanted leisure to think. The sunshine and the songs of the birds disturbed him. He went into the deep heart of the woods, where the light came filtered through the thick-leaved boughs of tall trees; where the shade was cool, sweet and fragrant, he lay down among the ferns and bracken to think.
It seemed to him terrible that in this free and beautiful land an innocent woman could be so cruelly tortured.
“There must be something terribly wrong,” he thought. “A woman is entirely at the mercy of her husband. He may bring what false charges he will against her. The divorce courts must be a curse, not a blessing. They have abolished the Hindoo suttee, but this seems to me a thousand times worse. That woman has suffered greater torture than any earthly fire could inflict. There is something wrong.”
He looked overhead. The tall branches were waving in the sweet western wind; all nature was fair, serene and calm. The story he had heard ran strangely through his mind.
“How much women suffer!” he thought. “Privations, cruelty, scandal, shame, unmerited disgrace.” And then his thoughts wandered to Clarice, who had died in the fair springtime of her youth and fair loveliness. He sprang from the ground with a cry of self-reproach.
“Here I am, lying in the shade, thinking of the wrongs of others, while she, my darling, is unavenged.”