'Now is your opportunity, Thornton,' whispered Helen to him. 'Come with me.'
Mrs. Jenkins, who had raised herself to a sitting posture on the couch, was perfectly pale; there was a tremulous motion in her lips and a nervous wandering of her hands, which showed that she had not yet got over the recent shock; but she did her utmost to nerve herself as Mrs. Griswold approached her, and her eyes, as they rested on her benefactress, had a soft and imploring expression.
'Annette tells me you are better, nurse, and that you want to speak to me,' said Helen, laying a kind light touch upon the patient's arm. 'You, however, scarcely yet seem to be yourself, and if there is anything in what you have to say calculated to excite you, perhaps it would be better to defer it until you are a little stronger.'
'What I have to say, dear madam,' said Mrs. Jenkins, in a low and feeble voice, 'ought, in the interests of truth and justice, to be told at once; the longer it is kept to myself the longer I shall feel myself guilty of gross deception to you, who have been so kind and good to me.'
'Deception, nurse?'
'Deception, I am afraid, it must be called, dear madam; not that I have myself actually deceived you, or that I would allow anybody connected with me to do so; but that certain things have been going on in which you were to some extent interested with which I was acquainted, and which I have kept from your knowledge.'
'I am perfectly certain,' said Helen, in her calm sweet voice, 'that you have knowingly done me no harm; I am perfectly certain, from the attention and devotion which you have shown to me since you have been in this house, that if you could have stood between me and harm's way, you would have done so. If; however, there is anything on your mind which it will render you easier to get rid of, if you think to clear your conscience by telling us--for this gentleman, Mr. Carey, is entirely in my confidence--anything which you think it behoves me to know, speak at once.'
'You are right in saying that there is nothing I would not do to shield you from harm, dear madam,' said Mrs. Jenkins, touching Helen's hand with her wan lips. 'The intrigue in which I was passively mixed up was arranged before I entered your house, and it is only within the last few minutes--when I fainted, in fact--it flashed upon me that the affair could possibly have any connection with your present dreadful sorrow.'
At these words Thornton Carey started, and bent forward his head to listen more attentively.
'Well, when you first engaged me to come to you,' said Mrs. Jenkins, 'you took for granted that I was respectable all through, and I hadn't courage enough to avow the truth. I ought to have said who and what my husband was and where he was then living. I should, but that he--but that I--but that there had been something against him. Not that he was not loving and good to me, and always had been, understand that, but he got into trouble when he was a young man, and the memory of that seems to have stuck to him, and respectable people were consequently unwilling to give him employment, and he was thus forced to do what he could, often what he hated, to gain a bare subsistence.