One quiet summer morning, however, when the heat was unusually great, she felt too listless to wander about, and so sat upon the grass, listening to the birds as they sang above her head, while Wilford, at some distance from her, stood leaning against a tree and thinking sad, regretful thoughts, as his eye rested upon the rough headstone at his feet.
“Genevra Lambert, aged 22,” was the lettering upon it, and as he read it a feeling of reproach was in his heart, while he said, “I hope I am not glad to know that she is dead.”
He had come to Alnwick for the sole purpose of finding that humble grave—of assuring himself that after life’s fitful fever, Genevra Lambert slept quietly, forgetful of the wrong once done to her by him. It is true he had not doubted her death before, but as seeing was believing, so now he felt sure of it, and plucking from the turf above her a little flower growing there, he went back to Katy and sitting down beside her with his arm around her waist, tried to devise some way of telling her what he had promised himself he would tell her there in that very yard, where Genevra was buried. But the task was harder now than before. Katy was so happy with him, trusting his love so fully that he dared not lift the veil and read to her that page hinted at once in Silverton, when they sat beneath the butternut tree, with the fresh young grass springing around them. Then she was not his wife, and the fear that she would not be if he told her all had kept him silent, but now she was his alone; nothing could undo that, and there, in the shadow of the grey old church through whose aisles Genevra had been borne out to where the rude headstone was gleaming in the English sunlight, it seemed meet that he should tell the sad story. And Katy would have forgiven him then, for not a shadow of regret had darkened her life since it was linked with his, and in her perfect love she could have pardoned much. But Wilford did not tell. It was not needful, he made himself believe—not necessary for her ever to know that once he met a maiden called Genevra, almost as beautiful as she, but never so beloved. No, never. Wilford said that truly, when that night he bent over his sleeping Katy, comparing her face with Genevra’s, and his love for her with his love for Genevra.
Wilford was very fond of his girlish wife, and very proud of her, too, when strangers paused, as they often did, to look back after her. Thus far nothing had arisen to mar the happiness of his first weeks of married life, except the letters from Silverton, over which Katy always cried, until he sometimes wished that the family could not write. But they could and they did; even Aunt Betsy inclosed in Helen’s letter a note, wonderful both in orthography and composition, and concluding with the remark that “she would be glad when Catherine returned and was settled in a home of her own, as she would then have a new place to visit.”
There was a dark frown on Wilford’s face, and for a moment he felt tempted to withhold the note from Katy, but this he could not do then, so he gave it into her bands, watching her as with burning cheeks, she read it through, and asking her at its close why she looked so red.
“Oh, Wilford,” and she crept closely to him, “Aunt Betsy spells so queerly, that I was wishing you would not always open my letters first. Do all husbands do so?”
It was the only time Katy had ventured to question a single act of his, submitting without a word to whatever was his will. Wilford knew that his father would never have presumed to break a seal belonging to his mother, but he had broken Katy’s, and he should continue breaking them, so he answered, laughingly,
“Why, yes, I guess they do. My little wife has surely no secrets to hide from me?”
“No secrets,” Katy answered, “only I did not want you to see Aunt Betsy’s letter, that’s all.”
“I did not marry Aunt Betsy—I married you,” was Wilford’s reply, which meant far more than Katy guessed.