Ah! how little the poor young creature knew that the document upon which she founded her faith in the indissoluble legality of her marriage was the very same upon which Alexander Lyon, her husband, based his belief in his freedom from matrimonial bonds.
But this is a mystery.
As soon as she had recovered some degree of composure, she availed herself of her knowledge of his address to write to him the first letter she had been able to send him in some months. In this letter so entirely was she taken up by her love and her sorrow, that she utterly forgot to mention the enormous fortune that had been left her. She wrote him a long, earnest, impassioned appeal, praying him by the love he once bore her, and by the love that she must ever bear him, since it was the life of her life, to come to her, if only for a little while; she said, pathetically, that she would never ask it again.
“Oh, these words are cold and lifeless,” she wrote. “But if you were here, my soul would find some means of reaching yours. My lips and my eyes and my hands would show you that they only live when they meet yours. Oh, come home! I die, Alick! I die! Come and save me! Come, if only for a little while. Oh, my beloved, my whole heart and soul and life goes out in this cry—Come home!”
CHAPTER XXXVI.
AGONY.
The peace that others seek they find;
The heaviest storms not longest last;
Heaven grants even to the guilty mind,
An amnesty for what is past.
I only pray to know the worst,