‘It was so wrong of me to leave you, dear, in that hurried manner,’ she whispers one day when Mrs Dunstan is convalescent, ‘but I was so angry to think you could suspect me of flirting with your dear old husband. I ought to have told you from the first what all those meetings and letters meant, and I should have done so only they involved the character of my darling Jack. The fact is, dear, my boy got into a terrible scrape up country—and the colonel says the less we talk of it the better—however, it had something to do with that horrid gambling that men will indulge in, and it very nearly lost Jack his commission, and would have done so if it hadn’t been for the dear colonel. But he and I plotted and worked together till we got Jack out of his scrape, and now we’re as happy as two kings; and you will be so too, won’t you dear Mrs Dunstan, now that you are well again, and know that your Charlie has flirted no more than yourself?’
‘I have been terribly to blame,’ replies poor Ethel. ‘I see that now, and I have suffered for it too, bitterly.’
‘We have all suffered, my darling,’ says the colonel, tenderly; ‘but it may teach us a valuable lesson, never to believe that which we have not proved.’
‘And never to disbelieve that which we have not disproved,’ retorts Ethel. ‘If I had only been a little more credulous and a little less boastful of my own courage, I might not have lived to see my child torn from my arms by the spirit of the white woman.’
And whatever Ethel Dunstan believed or not, I have only, in concluding her story, to reiterate my assertion that the circumstances of it are strictly true.
THE END.
