Chapter XLII.
MARY GREY'S STORY.
At length her minister came to see her. He expressed the deepest sympathy with her sufferings, and implored her to relieve her overburdened heart by confiding in him or in his wife, from either or both of whom, he assured her, she should receive respectful compassion and substantial assistance, if the last was necessary.
Then, pretending to yield to his better judgment, she consented to give him her confidence.
And taking him up to her own sitting-room, where they could be safe from interruption, she bound him over to secrecy, and then, with many affected tears and moans, she told him the astounding story that she had long been privately married to Mr. Alden Lytton, who had deserted her within a few days after their wedding, and who had recently, as every one knew, united himself in matrimony with Miss Emma Cavendish, of Blue Cliffs, Virginia, and had gone with her on a wedding trip to Europe.
While she told him this stupendous tale, the minister sat with open mouth and eyes, gazing on her with more of the air of an idiot than of a learned and accomplished gentleman.
He was, in fact, utterly amazed and confounded by the story he had heard.
That Alden Lytton, a young man of the highest social position, of unblemished reputation from his youth up, an accomplished scholar, a learned jurist, an eloquent barrister, and, more than all, a Christian gentleman, should have been guilty of the base treachery and the degrading crime here charged upon him was just simply incredible—no more nor less than incredible.