They seemed to sear the girl's brain—the words she read—but summoning all her self-control, and seeming scarcely to breathe, she permitted as yet no expression of sorrow, of passion, or emotion of any kind to escape her.
'DEAREST LITTLE WIFE,
'I write you, Maggie, as I promised, as I cannot see you before leaving for Egypt, and fear the sorrow of such another parting as our last may kill me, for you know that all the love of my heart is yours, though I have been entrapped into a marriage with Maude Lindsay—a mad entanglement, for which I ask your forgiveness and pity, that you may not bring me to punishment and shame. I will buy your silence at any price; let me have back the marriage certificate and all letters, and I herewith enclose a blank cheque for you to fill up at your pleasure. This I do, dear little one, for the sake of our old——'
Here Maude reeled, for the room seemed to revolve round her.
'There!' said this odious woman exultingly, as she hastened to refold the letter and replace it in her breast, 'will you deny it longer?'
The speaker showed neither the certificate nor the blank cheque; but poor Maude had seen enough. She fainted, and when she recovered her obnoxious visitor was gone—gone, but had left a dreadful sting behind.
Had her presence and her story been all a dream? No! There was the chair in which she had been seated; there was the little Chippendale table on which she had spread the terrible letter that told of Jack's perfidy; and there on the floor, just where she had thrown or thrust them, lay the scattered books—his presents in the past time.
She cast herself on the sofa—she could neither think nor weep; her heart beat painfully—every pulsation was a pang! What was she to do—whither turn for advice before madness came upon her?
'Well, my old duck, Maggie, you have earned your money fairly, by all accounts—and my wonderful caligraphy was quite a success!' said Hawkey Sharpe, exploding with laughter, when he heard the narration of his 'fair' compatriot or conspirator, as he handed her a twenty-pound note, and drove with her townward in the cab with which he had awaited the termination of her visit at the Grange Loan. 'By Jove! a pleasant home-coming that fellow will have! "All men are brothers," says the minister of Earlshaugh; Cains and Abels, say I.'
'I don't care about him or what he may suffer—you men are all alike, a bad, false, cruel lot,' replied the woman; 'but, with all her airs and graces, her haughtiness and her touch-me-not manner, I am sorry for what that poor girl may be—nay, must be—enduring now.'