'The devil you are! all things are fair in love and war—and this is war!' said Hawkey, still continuing his bursts of malignant laughter; 'would she care for what you might endure?'
'I am sure she would—her face and her voice were so sweet and gentle.'
'For all that she would draw aside her skirt if it touched yours, as though there was a taint in the contact.'
The woman made no reply, but glared at him with defiant malevolence in her bold black eyes, and now seemed shocked at the very act which, a few minutes before, had given her much malignant satisfaction.
But we have not heard the last of Mr. Hawkey Sharpe's skill in caligraphy.
CHAPTER XLVII.
THE RESULT.
Sense returned to the unhappy creature ere her servants discovered her or knew that the mysterious visitor had departed.
'It cannot be! It cannot have happened—it is too dreadful—too cruel!' she repeated to herself again and again; but could she doubt the tenor of the letter she had seen and read—the letter in her husband's own handwriting? 'Oh, Heaven!' she murmured; 'our days together have been so blithesome and so happy, even when their brightest hours were clouded by a separation to come; but Oh, not such a separation as this! What have I done that God deems me so unworthy—that I am tortured, punished thus?'
'There is scarcely in the whole sad world,' it is said, 'and in the woeful scale of mental suffering, aught sadder than the helpless struggle of a poor human heart against a crushing load of misery, strengthening itself in its despair, taking courage from the extremity of its wretchedness in the frenzied whispers of reassurance.'