She took Hayes Meredith's letter out of her pocket as she spoke.
James Dugdale kept silence, looking at her. "Is she going to tell me the story of her life?" he thought. "Am I going at last to learn something of the history of this woman whom I love?"
Margaret did not speak for some moments; she looked at the letter in silence. Then she unfolded it, and said:
"I am glad you let me read this letter for myself, James" (she had dropped into the habit of calling him by his name); "there are some hard things in it, but they are true--and so, better spoken, no matter how hard they may be. But let us pass them over, they are said of the dead."
Her face hardened, and she turned it away from him. James Dugdale laid his thin hand on her arm.
"Margaret," he said, "you know I would not have given you that letter to grieve you. I was thinking so much of what Meredith says of himself and his son that I forgot the allusion to--"
"I know, I know," she said hurriedly; "don't say his name; I never do."
The admission was a confidence. She was breaking down the barrier of reserve between them. She trusted him. She might come to like him yet. The friendship at least of the woman he loved might yet come to gild this man's lonely life. It would be much to him to know that she forgave him; and there was something in her manner now so different from anything that had ever been there formerly, that he began to hope she had really forgiven him.
In his quiet life, James Dugdale had contrived to attain, with very little aid from experience, to a tolerable amount of comprehension of human nature, and he understood that Margaret's practically-enforced conviction, that he had been unerringly right in all he had suspected and predicted of the fate in store for her, in her marriage, had not made her more inclined to pardon the interference on his part which she had so bitterly resented. But this was all over now, he did not know why; he felt it, he did not understand it.
Was it that the natural elasticity of youth was asserting its power--that Margaret was regaining her spirits, was throwing off the burden of the past, and, with it, all the feelings which had obscured the brightness and injured the gentleness of her nature? This was the most probable explanation; if, indeed, there was any other, it did not present itself as an alternative to James Dugdale. While he was thinking thus, she began to speak again in a hurried tone: