“Yes, dear,” replied the other, a delicate flush mantling her cheeks as she thought of its contents—the cartridge and the wedding-ring; “shall I fetch it?”
“Please, dear; has anyone else seen it, grannie?”
“No, love; I have kept it locked up since the night of the—the accident.”
No more passed between these two on the subject, but each understood the other, and if the gloom did not lighten with the mutual understanding, their hearts grew stronger to endure its burden.
“Why do you not wear your wedding-ring?” her grandmother inquired one day.
“I lost it the morning George left.”
A look of perplexity crossed the other’s face, but the trouble in her grand-daughter’s eyes checked further inquiry.
When the “City of Seville” sailed into the port of Cadiz the captain of the vessel handed a sealed envelope to his passenger, Angus Forman, with the assurance, somewhat stiffly delivered, that his secret, whatever it might be, was safe with him.
The other received the envelope in silence, and when he broke the seal and found the letter from his wife’s grandmother, which had been the means of revealing his victim’s identity, he read it again without apparent emotion.
During the long weeks of delirium and slow recovery to health in which he had passed the interval of the sailing vessel’s slow passage, he had discounted all human misery it seemed to him, and as he stood on the deck, the mere skeleton of his former self, he felt alike indifferent to the approach of weal or woe.