She loved that other fellow or she would never have consented to marry him, was the thought that passed with lightning-like rapidity through his brain. She had also believed Lucy Caldwell’s report that he himself was fabulously rich, and, as that other love of his had done, thrown over the poorer suitor for the richer one.
He had been intending to tell Jess on their way back to the farmhouse that he was John Dinsmore, who had also been expected to come to her and lay his heart and fortune at her feet; now his lips were dumb. He decided to keep that fact a secret from her for the present, until he could see a path out of the dilemma in which he found himself; determining that for the present she should know him only as Mr. Moore, the man whom she had married on the impulse of the moment.
There was another decision he reached then and there, and that was, that he would lose no time in untying the knot between them which had been so hastily tied; and then, with the fortune which would be hers because the will of the elder Dinsmore had thus been complied with, she would be free to wed this lover who would be so heartbroken over her loss. For, of course, he must have been wedding her for love alone, it being well known all about where she lived that she would be penniless if she did not marry the heir of Blackheath Hall.
Yes, he would divorce Jess as soon as the law could accomplish it; that would be a shade better than to shuffle off the mortal coil to set her free, after giving her the right to the Dinsmore fortune.
In his calculations the bare possibility of another lover had never for an instant occurred to him.
All this changed his plans of the immediate future very materially.
He had been intending to announce their marriage as soon as they returned to the farmhouse, but under the present turn of affairs, he concluded that secrecy for the present was best.
“You are very angry with me!” sobbed the girl, wretchedly, and these words aroused him from the deep reverie into which he had fallen.
“You have stabbed me at my weakest point, little one,” he answered, very huskily, “reopened a wound which I have been endeavoring valiantly to heal. Of all things, I cannot endure a girl who throws off one lover coolly for another. I despise of all things, of all women, I mean, a jilt!”
Ah! if Jess had but told him the exact truth at that moment what a lifetime of pain would have been spared her; had but explained to him that she was fairly forced into the betrothal with that other one by Mrs. Bryson, the old housekeeper, because that other lover represented himself to be John Dinsmore, the heir of Blackheath Hall. Ah! what investigations would have been instigated at once, and what cruel wrong averted!