She answered her husband’s letter immediately:
“Alas! my beloved,” she wrote, “my reason for believing Fay to have been my sister is unanswerable. My mother on her death-bed told me of the relationship; told me the sad secret with bitter tears. Her knowledge of that story had cast a shadow on the latter years of her married life. I had seen her unhappy, without knowing the cause. On her death-bed she confided in me. I was almost a woman then, and old enough to understand what she told me. Women are so jealous where they love, George. I suffered many a sharp pang after my discovery of your previous marriage; jealous of that unknown rival who had gone before me, little dreaming that fatal marriage was to cancel my own.
“My mother’s evidence is indisputable. She must have known. As I grew older I saw that there was that in my father’s manner when Fay was mentioned which indicated some painful secret. The time came when I was careful to avoid the slightest allusion to my lost sister; but in my own mind and in my own heart I cherished her image as the image of a sister.
“I am grieved that you should despise Mr. Cancellor and his opinions. My religious education was derived entirely from him. My father and mother were both careless, though neither was unbelieving. He taught me to care for spiritual things. He taught me to look to a better life than the best we can lead here; and in this dark hour I thank and bless him for having so taught me. What should I be now, adrift on a sea of trouble, without the compass of faith? I will steer by that, George, even though it carry me away from him I shall always devotedly love.—Ever, in severance as in union, your own
Mildred.”
She had written to Mr. Cancellor early that morning, asking him to call upon her before three o’clock. He was announced a few minutes after she finished her letter, and she went to the drawing-room to receive him.
His rusty black coat and slouched hat, crumpled carelessly in his ungloved hand, looked curiously out of harmony with Mrs. Tomkison’s drawing-room, which was the passion of her life, the shrine to which she carried gold and frankincense and myrrh, in the shape of rose du Barri and bleue du Roi Sèvres, veritable old Sherraton tables and chairs, and commodes and cabinets from the boudoir of Marie Antoinette, a lady who must assuredly have sat at more tables and written at more escritoires than any other woman in the world. Give her Majesty only five minutes for every table and ten for every bonheur du jour attributed to her possession, and her married life must have been a good deal longer than the span which she was granted of joy and grief between the passing of the ring and the fall of the axe.
Unsightly as that dark figure showed amidst the delicate tertiaries of Lyons brocade and the bright colouring of satin-wood tables and Sèvres porcelain, Mr. Cancellor was perfectly at his ease in Mrs. Tomkison’s drawing-room. He wasted very few of his hours in such rooms, albeit there were many such in which his presence was courted; but seldom as he appeared amidst such surroundings he was never disconcerted by them. He was not easily impressed by externals. The filth and squalor of a London slum troubled him no more than the artistic intricacies of a West End drawing-room, in which the culte of beauty left him no room to put down his hat. It was humanity for which he cared—persons, not things. His soul went straight to the souls he was anxious to save. He was narrow, perhaps; but in that narrowness there was a concentrative power that could work wonders.
One glance at Mildred’s face showed him that she was distressed, and that her trouble was no small thing. He held her hand in his long lean fingers, and looked at her earnestly as he said:
“You have something to tell me—some sorrow?”