“Thank you, Howard. I’ll never ask you again,” she said, for she believed it their farewell; but he knew it was not, and when she was recovered a little he summoned all his energies, and said:
“Edith, you seem to be afraid that what you have to tell me will make me love you less. I promise you that it shall not, and in token of that promise I have brought you this daisy which I found blossoming under the snow on Abelard’s grave, as if it were a message from him to mediate between us.”
He spoke slowly and held up the little white blossom before the eyes which looked at it and him so wonderingly.
“What do you mean?” Edith asked, faintly, and he replied:
“I mean that you have no need to tell the story, for I know it all!”
There was a sudden gasping for breath, a throwing back of the bed-clothes as if their weight oppressed her, and then Edith asked:
“What do you know?”
“I know that you were once Heloise Fordham, and lived in the cottage by the bridge, and were the wife of Abelard Lyle, and had a little daughter born in London, whom your mother carried away when you were insensible, and that you wrote all this in a letter to me before we were married, and supposed I got that letter until our wedding day, when you learned how we had both been deceived, and you tried so hard to tell me. You see I do know it all,” he continued. “I accidentally found your letter in the pocket where you put it with Arthur’s whistle. It was directed to me and I read it, and in my first surprise and bewilderment went away to be alone and think it out. I did think it out, and exonerated you entirely, and have come back to tell you so and assure you of my continued love and respect. Poor darling, how much you must have suffered, but it is all over now. Your secret is known to me, and that is all that is necessary. It shall die——”
He stopped short, struck by the look of pain and anguish on Edith’s face, and the low moan which escaped her as she drew herself away from him to the far side of the bed. He did not know then that her child still lived; he could not, for it was not thus written in her letter, and throwing up her hands, she cried:
“Oh, Howard, Howard, you do not know the whole, neither did I till mother came and told me. She went to the hospital after baby, as I said in my letter, and when she came back she told me baby was dead, and I believed her, nor ever had another thought until the night I was with her and you found me fainting at her feet. She could not die with that lie on her soul, and she told me the truth at last. Baby was not dead. She was adopted,—taken by some poor woman who lived in Dorset Street,—the number is in that letter or on the envelope somewhere, and the name Stover. Howard, my daughter is alive, and now you know the whole.”