"You need not reproach yourself so cruelly, so sternly, under circumstances in which you would not reproach another at all. Remember what you told me, you had the evidence of your own eyes and ears, and the testimony of documents, and of individuals against him!" said the abbess, soothingly.
"Yes! the evidence of my own eyes and ears, which mistook the counterfeit for the real! the testimony of documents that were forgeries, and of individuals that were false! And upon these I believed my noble husband guilty of a felony, and without even giving him an opportunity to explain the circumstances, or to defend himself, I left him even on our wedding-day! and have concealed myself from him for many months! exposing him to misconstruction, to dishonor and reproach. Oh, no! I can never, never pardon myself! Nor do I even know how he can ever pardon me. But he will! I am sure he will! Even as the Lord pardons all repented sin, however grievous, so will my peerless husband pardon me!" fervently exclaimed Salome.
The abbess reverted to her own troubles.
"I cannot understand," she said, "the mystery of that man's appearance here this morning."
"What man?" inquired Salome, who was so absorbed in thinking of her husband that she had nearly forgotten the existence of other men.
"'What man?' Why, daughter, the Count Waldemar de Volaski—the man who came here with the woman this morning—the man whom you mistook for your own husband, the Duke of Hereward, but whom I knew to be Waldemar de Volaski, once my betrothed, who was said to have been killed in a duel, shot through the heart, a quarter of a century ago!" answered the lady, emphatically.
Salome stared at the abbess for a few moments in amazed silence, and then exclaimed:
"Dear madam, good mother, are you still under that deep delusion?"
"Delusion!" echoed the lady.
"Yes, the deepest delusion. Dear lady, do you not know, can you not comprehend now that the man who visited us this morning was no other than John Scott, the counterpart whom even I really did mistake for the Duke of Hereward, as you say; and that the bold, bad beauty who accompanied him was his wife, Rose Cameron?"