“But why?” said Helen, “what do you think there is in it?”
“I have told you, surely! Letters—foolish letters of mine to that D’Aubigny. Oh how I repent I ever wrote a line to him! And he told me, he absolutely swore, he had destroyed every note and letter I ever wrote to him. He was the most false of human beings!”
“He was a very bad man—I always thought so,” said Helen; “but, Cecilia, I never knew that he had any letters of yours.”
“Oh yes, you did, my dear, at the time; do not you recollect I showed you a letter, and it was you who made me break off the correspondence?”
“I remember your showing me several letters of his,” said Helen, “but not of yours—only one or two notes—asking for that picture back again which he had stolen from your portfolio.”
“Yes, and about the verses; surely you recollect my showing you another letter of mine, Helen!”
“Yes, but these were all of no consequence; there must be more, or you could not be so much afraid, Cecilia, of the general’s seeing these, surely.” At this moment Lady Davenant’s prophecy, all she had said about her daughter, flashed across Helen’s mind, and with increasing eagerness she went on. “What is there in those letters that can alarm you so much?”
“I declare I do not know,” said Cecilia, “that is the plain truth; I cannot recollect—I cannot be certain what there is in them.”
“But it is not so long ago, Cecilia,—only two years?”
“That is true, but so many great events have happened since, and such new feelings, all that early nonsense was swept out of my mind. I never really loved that wretch—”