Reginald Brookes bit his lips in a burst of anger.
“Forgive me,” he said, humbly; “I had no idea you bore such sorrow. Thank Heaven he has paid the penalty and yes—I am glad that you saw it.”
“I am, too,” said Marion, who was deathly pale. “If it had to be—I am glad that I saw it.”
CHAPTER X.
A CONVICT’S CONFIDENCE.
That very afternoon Dr. Brookes got a letter from Dr. Greenaway. It was the first time he had heard from him since he loaned him the five thousand dollars.
“Poor chap! He little knows what a shock I had,” he thought, “when for a moment I thought I had discovered his sweetheart in that drunken woman!”
He tore open the letter and read it hastily. It was very brief and only took a minute.
“I am nicely settled,” wrote Greenaway, “and would be perfectly happy, but my sweetheart has thrown me over—jilted me—to be honest. Of course you will think that if I can talk of it I do not suffer, but at just this minute I must talk or die, and you, doc, are my friend, the only one I have in creation. Yes, May has left me and gone, I don’t know where, but to be honest again, I think it is to the devil! She was always gay, but I trusted her, doc, even while she was abroad for three months. I did not doubt her, but now there is no use denying it any longer, she is a bad, dissolute woman—and yet I love her!”
There was a little more to the doctor’s strange letter, but it was the postscript that Dr. Brookes remembered longest and wondered most over.