With something very like a groan he made a precipitate retreat. He could not tell her what he had come here to say, to consult her about, he would have to write, or wait until Stanton was there. He wanted her to have one more good night. He loved her radiance. She wronged him if she thought he was jealous of her happiness, or of Gabriel Stanton, although he wished so desperately and so ignorantly that her lover had been other than he was.
Margaret had her uninterrupted night, her last happy night. Peter Kennedy turned and tossed, and tossed and turned on his narrow bed, the sheets grew hot and crumpled and the pillow iron-hard, making his head ache. Towards morning he left his bed, abandoning his pursuit of the sleep that had played him false, and went for a long tramp. At six o’clock, the sun barely risen and the sea cold in a retreating tide, he tried a swim. At eight o’clock he was nevertheless no better, and no worse than he had been the day before, and the day before that. He breakfasted on husks; the bacon and eggs tasted little better. Then he read Mrs. Roope’s letter for about the twentieth time and wished he had the doctoring of her!
Dear Dr. Kennedy:—
I am sorry to say that since I last saw you additional facts have come to my knowledge which in fairness to the purity which is part of the higher life I cannot ignore. That Mr. Gabriel Stanton had been visiting my cousin’s wife during the six months in which she should have been penitently contemplating the errors and misdemeanours of her past, her failure in true wifeliness, I knew. That you had been passing many hours daily with her, and at unseemly hours, have also slept in her house, has only now come to my knowledge. I am nauseated by this looseness. Marriage should improve the human species, becoming a barrier against vice. This has not been so with the wife of my husband’s cousin. As Mrs. Eddy so truly says “the joy of intercourse becomes the jest of sin.” I return you the cheque you gave me and which becomes due next Wednesday. If neither you nor Mrs. Capel has any argument to advance that would cause me to alter my opinion I am constrained to lay the facts in my possession before the King’s Proctor. Two co-respondents make the case more complicated, but my duty more simple.
Yours without any spiritual arrogance but conscious of rectitude,
Sarah Roope.
“Damn her!” He had said it often, but it never forwarded matters. Time pressed, and he had done nothing, or almost nothing. He had received the letter Wednesday. On Friday before going up to Carbies he had wired, “Am consulting Mrs. C. wait result.”
The early morning post came late to Pineland. Dr. Kennedy had to wait until nine o’clock for his letters. As he anticipated on Saturday morning there was another letter from the follower of Mrs. Eddy:
Dear Dr. Kennedy:—
It is my duty to let you know that I have an appointment with James Capel’s lawyer for Monday the 29th inst.