I almost wished the paroxysms of anger back again.
“Oh! Beatrice, to leave me for another man when we were so happy together, because of a house; and an entire stranger, whom she did not want even to speak to, whom she was positively rude to. It could not have been our little tiff, could it? She must have been mad.”
“You have hit on the truth,” I said. “She was mad, quite mad. And mad people always turn against those whom they—love best.”
It is all a long time ago. I married a year later, and a year later still Ted married again, a sensible good-humoured woman, and was just as happy as he had been with Essie, happier even. In time he forgot her, but I did not. She had sailed away across “perilous seas.” She had passed beyond my ken. I could only hold her memory dear. And at last she became to me, what for so many years she had been to her lover—a dream.
[1] Probably originally Morass Hold.
[2] I thought the recording angel funny at the time until Barrett told me afterwards that it was cribbed from Rhoda Broughton.
[3] First Published in 1909.