She loved him; and the angry feelings which had prompted her to run away from Tolldale Priory, willingly abandoning all claim to his name and his protection, were beginning to give way now. Mrs. Lennard’s story had thrown new light upon the past, and Eleanor made all kinds of excuses for her husband’s conduct. It was his habit to bear all sorrows quietly. Who could tell what anguish he might have felt in the thought of his young wife’s falsehood?
“He would not pursue Margaret Ravenshaw,” Eleanor thought, “and he makes no attempt to find me. And yet he may love me as truly as he loved her. Surely if God refused to hear my prayers for revenge, he will grant me the power to justify myself.”
She could only blindly hope for some unknown chance that might bring about her justification; and that chance would perhaps never come. She was very unhappy when she thought of this; and it was only the perpetual confusion in which Major Lennard and his wife contrived to keep everybody belonging to them, that saved her from suffering very cruelly.
All this time she was quite ignorant of the appearance of an advertisement which had been repeated at the top of the second column of the Times supplement every day for nearly a month, and about which idle people hazarded all many of conjectures—
ELEANOR, come back. I was rash and cruel. I will trust you.
G. M.
Major Lennard was in the habit of seeing the Times every day at Galignani’s; but, as he was not a very acute observer or original thinker, he took no notice of the repetition of this advertisement beyond an occasional, “By Jove! Haw! that poor dayv’l’s still advertising for El’ner!” nor did he ever make any allusion to the circumstance in his domestic circle.
So Eleanor hugged her sorrows secretly in the gayest city of the world, while Gilbert Monckton was hurrying hither and thither, and breaking his heart about his lost wife.
I think that pitying angels must sometimes weep over the useless torments, the unnecessary anguish, which foolish mortals inflict upon themselves.