“My Dear Owen:
“The Indian mail came in yesterday, and brought me a letter from David, written a week before he died. He asked me to break it to my father that a Major Carey, in his regiment, was on his way home to take divorce proceedings against his wife, citing David as co-respondent. David asked me in the letter to do anything I could for Mrs. Carey, as she is by herself, with no relations in England. The case was to be undefended, and David had decided to leave the Army and come to England as soon as possible to marry Mrs. Carey. I gather that he was very unhappy, especially at having to leave the regiment. I still do not know whether he found a dreadful solution to the whole question, in taking his own life.
“Mrs. Carey has written to Father, a strange note, which he showed me. She says nothing of the divorce proceedings, but only writes as a great friend of David’s, imploring to be allowed to see us. Naturally, Father is only too anxious to see her, and as she says that she is on her way to Scotland at once, we are coming to London on the 10th so as to meet her.
“I have told Father nothing whatever of David’s letter to me. I cannot imagine that Mrs. Carey will want to make the facts known to him, but I shall be able to judge better when I have seen her, which I have decided to do, by myself, before the appointment with Father.
“I can arrange this a great deal better with your help than without it, therefore will you come and see us on the evening we arrive—Thursday the 10th, at about six o’clock, Carrowby’s Hotel?
“Please destroy this letter.
“Yours sincerely,
“Flora Morchard.”
Quentillian, as he read Flora’s unvarnished statements, felt a sensation as of being appalled.
He could not believe that Flora, fanatically single-minded as her determination to shield her father from the knowledge of the truth might be, had any conception of the difficulties that probably lay before her, and he asked himself also whether she had in any degree realized what the consequences must be to the Canon, far more than to herself, of a deception that should break down half way.
His absolute conviction of Flora’s inflexibility, and his own strong sense of the impertinence, in both the proper and the colloquial sense of the word, of offering unasked advice, were not enough to restrain him from the mental composition of several eloquent and elaborate expositions of opinion. But they sufficed to restrain him from transferring the eloquence to a sheet of notepaper.