“No, my dear John, your fears were unfounded, I have not been ill. I wish I had been—sick unto death! I have been too wretched to write, that was all. Why should I distress you with a reiteration of my misery—and I cannot write, or think about anything else? I have no doubt Darwin’s book is good, but I could not interest myself in it. The thought of my own misery comes between me and every page I read.
“You ask me what I mean to do with my life when my dark days are over. To that question there can but be one answer. I mean, so far as it is possible, to forget. I shall go down to my grave burdened with my dismal secret; but I shall exercise every faculty I possess to keep that secret to the end. He is not likely to betray me. The knowledge of his own baseness will seal his lips.
“Your suggestion of a future home in some quiet village, either in England or abroad, is kindly meant, I know, but I shudder at the mere idea of such a life. To pass as a widow; to have to answer every prying acquaintance—the doctor, the clergyman—people who would force themselves upon me, however secluded my life might be; to devote myself to a duty which in every hour of my existence would remind me of my folly and of my degradation: I should live like the galley-slave who drags his chain at every step.
“You tell me that the tie which would be a sorrow in the beginning might grow into a blessing. That could never be. You know very little of a woman’s nature when you suggest such a possibility. What can your sex know of a woman’s agony under such circumstances as mine? You are never made to feel the sting of dishonour.”
A light began to dawn on Mildred as she read this second letter from Evian. The first might mean anything—an engagement broken off, a proud girl jilted by a worthless lover, the sense of degradation that a woman feels in having loved unwisely—in having wasted confidence and affection upon an unworthy object: Mildred had so interpreted that despairing letter. But the second revealed a deeper wound, a darker misery.
There were sentences that stood out from the context with unmistakable meaning. “When my dark days are over”—“to pass as a widow”—“to devote myself to a duty which would remind me of my folly and my degradation.”
That suggestion of a secluded life—of a care which should grow into a blessing—could mean only one thing. The wretched girl who wrote that letter was about to become a mother, under conditions which meant life-long dishonour.
White as marble, and with hands that trembled convulsively as they held the letter, Mildred Greswold read on, hurriedly, eagerly, breathlessly, to the last line of the last letter. She had no scruples, no sense of wrong-doing. The secret hidden in that little packet of letters was a secret which she had a right to know—she above all other people, she who had been cheated and fooled by false imaginings.
The third letter from Evian was dated late in January:
“I have been very ill—dangerously, I believe—but my doctor took unnecessary trouble to cure me. I am now able to go out of doors again, and I walk by the lake for half-an-hour every day in the morning sun. The child thrives wonderfully, I am told; but if there is to be a change of nurses, as there must be—for this woman here must lose sight of her charge and of me when I leave this place—the change cannot be made too soon. If Boulogne is really the best place you can think of, your plan would be to meet me with the nurse at Dijon, where we can take the rail. We shall post from here to that town. I am very sorry to inflict so much trouble upon you, but it is a part of my misery to be a burden to you as well as to myself. When once this incubus is safely disposed of, I shall be less troublesome to you.