Her entire worldly wealth consisted of one franc and fifty centimes; but her father's chronic impecuniosity had taught Laline the method by which the poor and improvident raise money, and, with a beating heart and a hot flush on her cheek, Laline stopped on her way to the station to change the two rings which Armstrong had given her, the turquoise and diamond engagement-ring, the hated wedding-ring, together with her much-loved mother's watch and chain, for money wherewith to buy her freedom.
For it seemed to Laline that she would be free of the horrible, loveless bargain which her marriage had been could she but tear from her finger the gold circlet which Wallace Armstrong had an hour ago placed there, could she but put the sea between herself and him, and, losing herself in the vastness of London, change her name and live out her life away from him and his evil influence.
Her heart was full of the most passionate indignation against both him and her father; of the latter, indeed, she hardly dared to think, so deeply did she resent his treatment of her; but of Armstrong she thought with a growing fear and horror, which dwelt upon the brutality of his speeches and the cruelty of his expression, until he seemed to her to be scarcely human. Rather death than a return to the care of either of those men! Terror lent wings to her feet, until, breathless, panting, but with a great sigh of relief, she jumped into the already moving train for Calais.
Fortune favoured the runaway. The passage was smooth enough under a gray, lowering sky, and Laline's heart leaped within her at sight of the white cliffs of her native land in the afternoon. Before six o'clock on that eventful day the Dover train steamed into Charing-Cross Station, and Laline Armstrong stepped out upon the platform, a slim, girlish figure, alone and friendless in the great city of London.
CHAPTER VII.
On a winter afternoon in London, rather more than four years after Laline's flight from Boulogne, a beautiful young woman stood in the ground-floor sitting-room of a London lodging-house, poring over the advertisements headed "Wanted" in a daily paper.
To the owner of the house, who was a relative of her old friend Mrs. Melville, of Norwood, this young lady was known as Miss Lina Grahame; but the reader has already made her acquaintance as Laline Garth, who, on a certain rainy morning in Boulogne, became the bride of Wallace Armstrong.
For four years Laline had earned her living in the girls'-school kept by her mother's old school-fellow—four well-occupied uneventful years, spent in the schoolroom, the dormitory, the Crystal Palace, and walks in the neighbourhood of Norwood, looking after the younger pupils, teaching French to the elder ones, preparing and correcting lessons and studying for examinations, with the duties of every hour in the day well-defined and clear, a healthy but monotonous life of gray routine and unchangeable discipline.
And now, at the age of forty-two, Mrs. Melville, Laline's employer and friend, had been carried off to Canada by a cousin and old sweetheart, who, finding himself at the age of forty-five a well-to-do widower, with four young children, had bethought him of that eminent instructress of youth, his widowed cousin, and in a very practical letter had proposed to come over to England, marry her, and take her back with him to Canada to look after his household and his children.