“You hear, you understand, Adah is your wife, your very own, and you must go back to her at once. You do understand me?” and Alice grew very earnest as the doctor failed to rouse up, as she thought he ought to do.
Appealing next to Anna, she continued:
“Pray, make him comprehend that his wife is at Terrace Hill.”
Very gently Anna answered:
“She was there, but she has gone. He knows it; I came to tell him, but she fled immediately after recognizing my brother, and left a letter revealing the whole.”
It had come to ’Lina by this time that Dr. Richards could never be her husband, and with a bitter cry, she covered her face with her hands, and went shivering to the corner where Mrs. Worthington sat, as if a mother’s sympathy were needed now, and coveted as it had never been before.
“Oh, mother,” she sobbed, laying her head in Mrs. Worthington’s lap, “I wish I had never been born.”
Sadly her wail of disappointment rang through the room, and then the convict went on with his interrupted narrative.
“When the marriage was over, Mr. Hastings took his wife to another part of the city, hiding her from his fashionable associates, staying with her most of the time, and appearing to love her so much that I thought it would not be long before I should venture to tell him the truth. It would be better to write it, I thought, and so I left her with him while I went South on—the very laudable business of stealing negroes from one State and selling them in another. At Cincinnati, I wrote to the doctor, confessing the whole, but it seems my letter never reached him, for, though I did not know it then, the car containing that mail was burned, and my letter was burned with it. Some of you know that I was caught in my traffic, and that the negro stealer, Sullivan, was safely lodged in prison, from which he was released but a day since. Fearing there might be some mistake, I wrote from my prison home to Adah herself, but suppose it did not reach New York till after she had left it.”
A casual observer would have said that Mrs. Worthington had heard less of that strange story than anyone else, so motionless she sat, but not a word was missed by her in the entire narrative, and when the narrator concluded, she said anxiously,