Taking a seat at my side, and with a voice meant to recall me to a quiet and business-like demeanor, she asked me to read over Miss Crofton's letter. I told her that I knew every line of it by heart, and, more still, I knew the whole story to which it related. It was a topic that required the nicest delicacy to touch on, but with a frankness that charmed me, she said,—
“You have had the candor to tell me freely your story; let me imitate you, and reveal mine.
“You know who we are, and whence we have sprung; that my father was a simple laborer on a line of railroad, and by dint of zeal and intelligence, and an energy that would not be balked or impeded, that he raised himself to station and affluence. You have heard of his connection with Sir Elkanah Crofton, and how unfortunately it was broken off; but you cannot know the rest,—that is, you cannot know what we alone know, and what is not so much as suspected by others; and of this I can scarcely dare to speak, since it is essentially the secret of my family.”
I guessed at once to what she alluded; her troubled manner, her swimming eyes, and her quivering voice, all betraying that she referred to the mystery of her father's fate; while I doubted within myself whether it were right and fitting for me to acknowledge that I knew the secret soucre of her anxiety, she relieved me from my embarrassment by continuing thus,—
“Your kind and generous friends have not suffered themselves to be discouraged by defeat. They have again and again renewed their proposals to my mother, only varying the mode, in the hope that by some stratagem they might overcome her reasons for refusal. Now, though this rejection, so persistent as it is, may seem ungracious, it is not without a fitting and substantial cause.”
Again she faltered, and grew confused, and now I saw how she struggled between a natural reserve and an impulse to confide the soitow that oppressed her to one who might befriend her.
“You may speak freely to me,” said I, at last. “I am not ignorant of the mystery you hint at. Crofton has told me what many surmise and some freely believe in.”
“But we know it,—know it for a certainty,” cried she, clasping my hand in her eagerness. “It is no longer a surmise or a suspicion. It is a certainty,—a fact! Two letters in his handwriting have reached my mother,—one from St. Louis, in America, where he had gone first; the second from an Alpine village, where he was laid up in sickness. He had had a terrible encounter with a man who had done him some gross wrong, and he was wounded in the shoulder; after which he had to cross the Rhine, wading or swimming, and travel many miles ere he could find shelter. When he wrote, however, he was rapidly recovering, and as quickly regaining all his old courage and daring.”
“And from that time forward have you had no tidings of him?”
“Nothing but a check on a Russian banker in London to pay to my mother's order a sum of money,—a considerable one, too; and although she hoped to gain some clew to him through this, she could not succeed, nor have we now any trace of him whatever. I ought to mention,” said she, as if catching up a forgotten thread in her narrative, “that in his last letter he enjoined my mother not to receive any payment from the assurance company, nor enter into any compromise with them; and, above all, to live in the hope that we should meet again and be happy.”