"I've found it; I declare I've found it; the identical hole in the trunk where I used to put all my treasures—my 'magpie's nest,' as they called it, where I hid every thing I could find. What a mischievous young scamp I was!"
"Very," said Miss Williams, affectionately, laying a gentle hand on his curls—"pretty" still, though cropped down to the frightful modern fashion. Secretly she was rather proud of him, this tall young fellow, whom she had had on her lap many a time.
"Curious! It all comes back to me—even to the very last thing I hid here, the day before we left, which was a letter."
"A letter!"—Miss Williams slightly started—"what letter?"
"One I found lying under the laurel bush, quite hidden by its leaves. It was all soaked with rain. I dried it in the sun, and then put it in my letter-box, telling nobody, for I meant to deliver it myself at the hall door with a loud ring—an English postman's ring. Our Scotch one used to blow his horn, you remember?"
"Yes," said Miss Williams. She was leaning against the fatal bush, pale to the very lips, but her veil was down—nobody saw. "What sort of a letter was it, David? Who was it to? Did you notice the handwriting?"
"Why, I was such a little fellow," and he looked up in wonder and slight concern, "how could I remember? Some letter that somebody had dropped, perhaps, in taking the rest out of the box. It could not matter—certainly not now. You would not bring my youthful misdeeds up against me, would you?" And he turned up a half-comical, half-pitiful face.
Fortune's first impulse—what was it? She hardly knew. But her second was that safest, easiest thing—now grown into the habit and refuge of her whole life—silence. "No, it certainly does not matter now."
A deadly sickness came over her. What if this letter were Robert Roy's, asking her that question which he said no man ought ever to ask a woman twice? And she had never seen it—never answered it. So, of course, he went away. Her whole life—nay, two whole lives—had been destroyed, and by a mere accident, the aimless mischief of a child's innocent hand. She could never prove it, but it might have been so. And, alas! alas! God, the merciful God, had allowed it to be so.
Which is the worst, to wake up suddenly and find that our life has been wrecked by our own folly, mistake, or sin, or that it has been done for us either directly by the hand of Providence, or indirectly through some innocent—nay, possibly not innocent, but intentional—hand? In both cases the agony is equally sharp—the sharper because irremediable.