“You are speaking out of pity for me. You think I would die beneath it, unless you sacrificed yourself and gave me the protection of your name,” she said, speaking almost eagerly. “Tell me this is so. But you do not know how I feel. I can bear it somehow, or else I can die. I could never accept such a sacrifice from you, and, oh, I could never think of marriage again, even to the best and noblest creature on God’s earth, without a shrinking that is pain intolerable.”
Noel saw he had made a mistake. He saw, too, that the only way out of it was to let her put this interpretation on it. So he merely soothed and comforted her, and told her things should be as she chose, and then he tied her bonnet under her chin as if she had been a little girl, gave her her gloves, lowered the veil before her face and asked her if she were ready.
“You will take your sweet girl-name,” he said, “and be known as Mrs. Verrone. Only Mrs. Murray and I will know anything of your past, and we will now turn that page, Christine, and go forth into a new world—and a brighter one, please God.”
XII.
Christine was ill for many weeks, with Dr. Belford in daily attendance, and her faithful old Eliza to help Mrs. Murray with the nursing. All during the long fever, the gentle, little old lady, to whom Noel had confided her, watched and tended her with a mother’s devotion and love. The patient was far too ill to protest, and very soon she learned to lean upon and love Mrs. Murray as though she had indeed been her mother. Again poor Noel felt himself banished, ignored and excluded, as he alone was kept away from her, but his care for her was so supremely above his care for himself that he never made a complaint.
He had learned from Eliza—whose mouth was shut so tight to the other servants that she went among them almost like a dumb woman—that on the day of his making the announcement concerning her husband to Christine, a messenger had brought Dallas a note, after reading which he had hurriedly put a few things into a valise and left the house. Since then he had not been heard from. Evidently Christine had warned him in her note and he had run away to escape the suit for bigamy. Noel had not suspected the poor girl’s motive in writing, but, on the whole, he was glad. It was the simplest and surest way of getting rid of him.
At last Dr. Belford had pronounced the patient convalescent, and she was sitting up and even moving about the up-stairs rooms.