There were no reserves now between the two girls, and laying her head in Alice’s lap, Adah sobbed, “I’m thinking of Willie’s father. Will he never come back? Can it be he meant to deceive me, Miss Johnson?” and Adah lifted up her head, disclosing a face which Alice scarcely recognized, for the strange expression there. “Miss Johnson, if I knew that George deliberately planned my ruin under the guise of a mock marriage, and then when it suited him deserted me as a toy of which he was tired, I should hate him!”
She hissed the words between her shut teeth, and Alice involuntarily shuddered at the hard, relentless look, which only a deceived, deserted woman can wear. She did not dream that Adah, who had seemed so gentle, so good, could put on such a look, and she gazed at her in astonishment, as in clear, determined tones she repeated the words, “Yes, I should hate him!
“I know it’s wrong,” she continued, “and I’ve asked God many a time to take the feeling away, but it’s in me yet, and sometimes, when I get to thinking of the time before he came, when I was a happy, innocent school girl, without a care for anything, my heart turns into stone, and the prayer I would say will not come. Miss Johnson, you don’t know what it is to love with your whole soul one who, to all appearance, was worthy of your love, and who, the world would say, was above you in position—to trust him implicitly, to worship the very earth he trod, to feel ’twas Heaven where he was, to have no shadow of suspicion, to believe yourself his lawful wife, and then some dreadful morning wake up and find him gone, you know not where—to wait and watch through weary weeks and months of agonizing pain, and then to hear at last, in his own handwriting, that you were not a wife that the whole was a mockery, a marriage of convenience, which circumstances rendered it necessary for him to break, that his proud family would not receive you, that though he loved you still, his bride must be rich to please his aristocratic mother, and then to end with the hope thrown out that sometime he might come back and make you truly his. But for that I should have died, and, as it was, I felt my heart-strings snapping, one by one, felt the blood freezing in my veins, felt that I was going mad. I frighten you, Miss Johnson,” she said, as she saw how Alice shrunk away from the dark eyes in which there was a fierce, resentful gleam, unlike sweet Adah Hastings. “I used to frighten myself when I saw in my eyes the demon which whispered suicide.”
“Oh, Adah, Mrs. Hastings,” and Alice involuntarily wound her arm around the young girl-woman as if to shield her from sin. “You could not have dreamed of that!”
“I did,” and Adah spoke sadly now. “I forgot God awhile, and He left me to myself, but followed me still, going with me all through those crowded streets, close at my side, though I did not know it, and holding me back at the last moment, when the tempter was about to triumph, and the river rolling at my feet looked so invitingly to poor, half-crazed me, He put other thoughts in my head, and where I went to throw my life away, I knelt down and prayed. It was kind in God to save me, and I’ve tried to love Him better since, to thank Him for His great goodness in leading me to Hugh, as He surely did; but there’s something savage in my nature, which has not been all subdued, and sometimes I’m rebellious, just as you see me now, and my heart, which at first was full of love for George, goes out against him for his base treachery.”
“And yet you love him still?” Alice said, inquiringly as she smoothed the beautiful brown hair.
“I suppose I do. A kind word from him would bring me back, but will it ever be spoken? Shall we ever meet again?”
She was silent a moment, and then Alice said, “I do not seek your confidence unless you are willing to give it. As you have told me your story in part, will you tell me the whole?”
There was no vindictiveness now in Adah’s face, and the soft brown eyes drooped mournfully beneath the heavy lashes as she told the story of her wrongs. Told of a young girl at Madam Dupont’s school, of the elegant stranger present at one examination, and who watched her with unfeigned interest as she worked out upon the board a most difficult problem in Euclid, standing so near to her that once when she accidentally dropped her crayon he picked it up and offered it to her with a few whispered words of commendation for her skill in mathematics. Of a chance meeting in the street. Of walks and rides, and blissful interviews at her own cozy little room in the boarding-house, where she had lived for years. Of marriage proposed at last, and sanctioned by her guardian. Of the necessity urged upon her why it should be kept a secret until the proud relatives were reconciled. Of going one night with her lover, her guardian and another witness, far out into the suburbs of the city to the house of a justice, who made her George’s wife. Of her guardian’s sudden departure, she knew not whither. Of a removal to another boarding-house more obscure, and in a part of the city where she never met again with any whom she had known before. Of months of perfect happiness. Of the hope growing within her that she was gradually, leading George to God. Of letters from home which made him blue, and which she never saw. Of his leaving her at last without a word or sign that he was going or had grown weary of her. Of the terrible suspense, the cruel letter, the attempt to take her life, of Willie’s birth, of her being turned from the house as a disreputable character, and coming at last to Spring Bank in quest of Hugh, and of the gradual dying out, as she sometimes feared, of her love for George Hastings.
“And Hugh?” Alice said, when Adah paused. “Why did you come to him? Had you known him before?”