“Major Pelham was my best friend during all my married life. I could not understand his conduct to me after my husband’s death. One night lately I felt the impulse to write to him—shall I tell you everything?”
“Yes.” Clavering was all calm attention then.
“It was the night after our last interview. It come over me that—that I would rather die than marry you. Yes, I mean what I say. I didn’t mean to kill myself. Oh, no! But I would rather have been killed than married to you.”
Clavering’s ruddy face grew pale. He got up, walked about the room, and sat down again, still close to Elizabeth. He saw she did not mean to be intentionally cruel, but was striving earnestly to tell him the whole truth.
“I have often heard of your power over other men, and I am sure you have great power over women too; for I felt in some way obliged to marry you unless some one came in to help me. And then I thought of Hugh Pelham, and I thought it would be at least two or three months before he got my letter; but he was evidently in London, and he cabled back. I feel sure he reached New York early this morning.”
“And did that money you owed have anything to do with it?”
“Yes. It troubled me dreadfully.”
“And for a paltry thousand or two you have broken your word to me, broken it when I needed most of all your faith in me?”
“It was not the money wholly.”
“It was also that I had lost my seat in the Senate of the United States?”