While agitated by these emotions, he was mechanically dressing himself. He went to his wardrobe to search for a thick coat, for the morning was still bitterly cold, and the overcoat that he had worn on the previous day and night had received some damage from Leo’s frantic pistol shots.
He took down coat after coat, but they were all too thin.
At length, far back in the wardrobe, he found one that he had not worn for many months. It belonged to the travelling suit that he had worn when he went to Alexandria to meet Drusilla and went to the parson to marry her.
With feelings of sadness, regret and compunction, he turned the garment about and looked at it. Then he carefully brushed it and put it on, buttoned it closely, and thrust both hands in his pockets to push them down. In doing so, he felt a folded paper. And in listless curiosity he took it out, opened it, and looked at it.
In an instant all his listlessness vanished. He held it from him, and gazed, and gazed at it with his eyes dilating, his lips parting, and his face blanching with what would have seemed at first view to be amazement and horror, but which soon proved to be delight and triumph.
He could scarcely believe the evidence of his senses. He suspected that he was dreaming. He pinched himself to prove that he was awake.
Then he suddenly dropped into a chair, waved the paper above his head, and burst into a loud laugh.
“Well,” he said, “if I had been the most consummate schemer that ever lived, I could not have plotted for myself better than fortune has planned for me. Now, then, Mr. Richard Hammond! Let us see now what are your prospects of ultimately winning the beauty and the heiress! But little Drusa! poor little Drusa! patient, loving little Drusa! Thank fortune that you neither know nor suspect anything of this matter! And you must neither know nor suspect it yet awhile! For the knowledge, or even the very suspicion of this, would go near to kill you. Very, very gradually must you be prepared for it, my darling; very, very gently must the truth be broken to you, my poor little girl!”
He felt now no embarrassment as to his relations, present or prospective, with his betrothed and her grandfather. He was ready to propose to Anna the next day, and to marry her in a month after, if expedient.
For the paper that he had found in the pocket of his wedding coat, and now held in his hand, proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that his marriage with poor Drusilla was informal, null and void; that it had always been so, and that he was legally free to love and to wed whomsoever he should please.