"No, I'm not drunk, Charley, if you mean that; and grief has not turned my brain yet; at all events I know what I said, and I mean it--read that!" and he handed him Katharine's note.
Yeldham read it through with contracting brows and pursing lips. He read it twice; then Streightley said, "That note was posted to me, and reached me the morning after my wife left her home. You see that it does not give the slightest clue to her whereabouts."
"It does not--it----"
"Why do you hesitate?"
"Well--there was no occasion for you to show me that letter; and you would not have shown it to me, I presume, if you intended your confidence to end there."
"I have come here to ask your advice and help, and with the full intention of concealing nothing from you."
"That is the only condition under which advice, to be worth any thing, can be given. Mrs. Streightley in that letter speaks of some plot or conspiracy of which you were cognisant, by which her whole life was warped and spoiled. I'm not quoting exact words, but that remains upon my mind as the sense of the passage. What does she mean by that?"
"She means that I, whom you have always known as an honourable man, acted on one occasion like a sneak and a scoundrel!--she means that I was so mad in my pursuit of her before we were married, that I descended to the use of foul means to carry my point; that I was base enough to be party to an arrangement which, as she says, warped and spoiled her life, for the sake of getting her for myself."
"This is strong language, Robert! Knowing you as I do, I should think your conduct even in this matter can hardly have been such as to justify this self-condemnation."
"Wait and hear the story before you judge. You know how I loved Katharine Guyon. I told you all about it that first day we went down to Middlemeads; I told you how, the first time in my life, I was passionately, madly in love with her. We spoke, if you recollect, of your friend Gordon Frere; but I did not tell you what I then knew--that he had paid great attention to Miss Guyon; that these attentions had been very well received by her, and that there was a very strong flirtation--if not an understood engagement--between them."