His words, and still more his tone, staggered Margaret not a little. The change in his face and manner within the last few minutes had indeed been most remarkable. At first he had seemed so struck with the consciousness of guilt, and so hopeless of forgiveness, that he had not dared to throw himself upon her mercy. Then he had appeared to recover himself a little; and now he was quite calm and composed as though all apprehension had passed away from him.
His voice as he said ‘I will read you the letter, Margaret,’ had even a tender reproach in it, as though he, and not she, were the injured party.
‘Read it,’ she said; but her tone was no longer stubborn and imperious. It was plain that this woman’s letter was not a love-letter, or he would not have consented to read it; and if it was not a love-letter, what cause had she for anger? And yet, if it was not so, why had he exhibited such confusion—nay despair?
‘I will read it, since you wish it,’ he went on, ‘though it is a breach of confidence. It is better to break one’s word than to break one’s heart.’
The morality of this aphorism was somewhat questionable, but Margaret nodded assent. She took it, no doubt, in a particular sense. It was certainly better that she should know the worst than that any proviso of a designing woman, made for her own wicked convenience, should be respected.
‘It is well to begin at the beginning,’ continued William Henry. ‘Be so good as to look at the address of that letter.’
She did so with an indifferent air. She could almost have said that she had seen it before, for she recognised it at once as one of those missives of which he had received so many of late.
‘Let me draw your attention to the postmark.’
It was ‘Mallow: Ireland.’
The letter fell from her hand. Self-humiliation mastered for the moment the happiness of discovering that he had not been false to her after all. It was certainly not with Mrs. Jordan that he was secretly corresponding, and probably with no one of her sex. If Margaret had been an older woman, with a larger experience of the ways of men, she might have regretted her misplaced indignation as ‘waste;’ it might have even struck her that the present mistake might weaken her position if on some future occasion she should have better reason for her reproaches, but she had no thought except for the injustice she had done her lover. She stood before him with downcast head, stupefied and penitent.