“How did you make the discovery?”
“By accident—this afternoon at The Hook. I found some papers and letters of my father’s in a cupboard below the bookcase. I knew nothing of their existence—should never have thought of searching for private papers there, for I had heard my father often say that he kept only magazines and pamphlets—things he called rubbish—in those cupboards. I wanted to put away some things, and I stumbled on a packet of letters which revealed the secret of Fay’s birth. I can come back to my duty with a clear conscience. May I stay with you, George?”
“May you? Well, yes; I suppose so,” with another kiss and a tender little laugh. “One cannot make a broken vase new again, but we may pick up the pieces and stick them together again somehow. You have taken a good many years out of my life, Mildred, and I doubt if you can give them back to me. I feel twenty years older than I felt before the beginning of this trouble; but now all is known, and you are my wife again—well, there may be a few years of gladness for us yet. We will make the most of them.”
All things dropped back into the old grooves at Enderby Manor. Mrs. Greswold and her husband were seen together at church on the Sunday morning after Mildred’s return, much to the astonishment of the congregation, who immediately began to disbelieve in all their own convictions and assertions of the past half-year, and to opine that the lady had only been in the South for her health, more especially as it was known that Miss Ransome had been her travelling companion.
“If she had quarrelled with her husband, she would hardly have had her husband’s niece with her all the time,” said Mrs. Porter, the doctor’s wife.
“But if there was no quarrel, why did he shut himself up like a hermit, and look so wretched if one happened to meet him?” asked somebody else.
“Well, there she is, anyhow, and she looks out of health, so you may depend some London physician ordered her abroad. They might as well have consulted Porter, who ought to know her constitution by this time. He’d have ordered her to Ventnor for the winter, and saved them both a good deal of trouble; but there, people never think they can be cured without going to Cavendish Square.”
Mildred’s strength seemed to fail her more in the happiness of that unhoped-for reunion than it had ever done during her banishment. She wanted to do so much at Enderby: to visit about among her shabby-genteel old ladies and her cottagers as in the cloudless time before Lola’s death; to superintend her garden; to visit old friends whose faces were endeared by fond association with the past; to be everywhere with her husband: walking with him in the copses, riding about the farms, and on the edge of the forest, in the dewy summer mornings. She wanted to do all these things, and she found that her strength would not let her.
“I hope that my health is not going to give way, just when I am so happy,” she said to her husband one day, when she felt almost fainting after their morning ride.