"Yes," she whispered, hanging her head as might have done a naughty child. With a gesture of surrender, she held out her hands. "I'm ashamed of what I did, David—and I'll try to be a better wife to you than I've been up to now."
Poor Banfield! As he took her in his arms his heart beat with suffocating joy; almost any other man would have felt her words, her implied prayer for forgiveness, curiously inadequate.
She looked at him with a peculiar, earnest look, as if trying to make up her mind to a certain course, and then, with a quick movement, she shook herself free and disappeared into the back room.
He heard the sound of a drawer opening, the fumbling of a key. A moment later she came back and thrust a small packet into his hand.
"There," she said, "open that, read what's inside, and then we'll burn it. Thank God, Rosy will never know now the shame you put on her mother. I've often thought how you would feel reading it, if I—died—before—you did!" and each word was punctuated by an angry sob.
The little packet which Rosaleen had placed in Banfield's hand was tied with blue ribbon, and on it was written: "In case of my death, to be forwarded to Mr. Banfield, The Brew House, Market Dalling."
It was Rosaleen's fingers which untied the knotted ribbon and which showed him, laid amid her little store of jewellery,—he had noticed that she still wore her wedding ring,—a sheet of notepaper on which was an attestation, sworn before a Commissioner of Oaths, that the letter which she had written to him, the confession which had sufficed to procure him his divorce, had been—false.
"But why?" he stammered. "Rosaleen—why?"
"Because I hated the life you made me lead at Market Dalling! I hate Market Dalling and the hateful people who live there! You wouldn't even let me play or sing on Sunday. And then, your sister Kate! She never gave me a kind word or look! D'you think that was pleasant?" she asked fiercely,—then more gently she added, "But I'm ashamed, I've always been ashamed of that letter, and I'd no idea, Dave, that it would make you do what it did."
The door behind them opened. Rosaleen turned around; she brushed the angry tears from her cheeks; there came over her tremulous mouth a charming, rather shy smile.