“She’s gone—run away—Medora,” he said. “She rose afore I was awake this morning, and when I came down house, I got this to breakfast. The post-man brought it, just as I was wondering what the mischief had become of her. Read it.”
He handed Lydia Medora’s epistle and sat and watched her while she read it. He did not interrupt but kept his eyes on her face and gnawed his knuckles as she read.
When she had finished, she let the fatal sheet fall on the ground and took off her glasses. Then she bent down and picked up the letter.
“A cheerful, damned sort of thing for a husband to get,” said Ned. “Going to marry Kellock, you see.”
“As to that, she’ll marry Kellock when you please and not before,” answered Lydia quietly. “I don’t know what to say to you, Ned. This is beyond anything. I never guessed for a moment she’d sink to such wickedness. God’s my judge I didn’t know she was having any truck with that man.”
The nurse looked in.
“Where’s doctor?” she asked.
“In the orchard with Mr. Dolbear,” answered Lydia. Mrs. Damerell departed and she turned again to Ned.
“It’s an insulting letter. I’m terribly shocked. I don’t pretend to understand the rising generation, my dear. After they grow out of childhood, they get too deep for me. But I couldn’t have thought any daughter of mine and my husband’s would ever have done this.”
“It’s all very plain to understand now,” he answered. “She wanted that man and she couldn’t chuck me without some sort of excuse, so she worked up this idea, that I was a brute and tormenting her to death and so on. Then she made Kellock believe it; and though he kept perfectly straight, so far as I know, while he thought Medora was happily married to me, as soon as she began about me being a cruel devil that made her life hell and all that, then Kellock no doubt believed her. Why, he went so far as to lecture me a while back along, and I knocked him in the water for doing so. I’ll swear he had no thought to run away with her then—unless he’s the biggest traitor that ever walked the earth. But he ain’t that sort. I simply can’t see that man doing this job.”