“For God’s sake, get the girl out of your house as soon as you can! Send her to some good school abroad—France, Germany, where you like, and save me from the possibility of discovery. My secret has been kept—my friends look up to me. I have outlived the worst part of my misery, and have learnt to take some interest in life. I could not survive the discovery of my wretched story.”
A later letter was briefer and more business-like.
“I fully concur in the settlement you propose, and would as willingly make the sum 40,000l. as 30,000l. Remember that, so far as money can go, I am anxious to do the uttermost. I hope she will marry soon, and marry well, and that she may lead a happy and honourable life under a new name—a name that she can bear without a blush. I should be much relieved if she could continue to live abroad.”
This was the last letter in the bundle tied with red ribbon. In the same pigeon-hole Mildred found the draft of a deed of gift, transferring 30,000l. India Stock to Fanny Fausset, otherwise Vivien Faux, on her twenty-first birthday, and with the draft there were several letters from a firm of solicitors in Lincoln’s Inn Fields relating to the same deed of gift.
The last of the letters fell from Mildred’s lap as she sat with her hands clasped before her face, dazed by this sudden light which altered the aspect of her life.
“Fool, fool, fool!” she cried.
The thought of all she had suffered, and of the suffering she had inflicted on the man she loved, almost maddened her. She had condemned her father—her generous, noble-hearted father—upon evidence that had seemed to her incontrovertible. She had believed in a stain upon that honourable life—had believed him a sinner and a coward. And Miss Fausset knew all that she had forfeited by that fatal misapprehension, and yet kept her shameful secret, caring for her own reputation more than for two blighted lives.
She remembered how she had appealed to her aunt to solve the mystery of Fay’s parentage, and how deliberately Miss Fausset had declared her ignorance. She had advised her niece to go back to her husband, but that was all.
Mildred gathered the letters together, tied them with the faded ribbon, and then went to her father’s writing-table and wrote these lines, in a hand that trembled with indignation:
“I know all the enclosed letters can tell me. You have kept your secret at the hazard of breaking two hearts. I know not if the wrong you have done me can ever be set right; but this I know, that I shall never again enter your house, or look upon your face, if I can help it. I am going back to my husband, never again to leave him, if he will let me stay.