"Oh, Mr. Blake, what are you going to do? Oh, I entreat of you, if you have any regard for me or poor Harriet, not to reveal what you know. Indeed, indeed, I don't want it! What should I do with half that money? I have everything I want, and am as happy as the day is long. Do you think I could ever be happy again if I turned poor Harriet out; do you think I could ever live in that grand place, knowing I had made her miserable for life? Oh, no, Mr. Blake! You are good and kind-hearted, and would not make any one unhappy, I know! Then let things go on as they are; and don't say anything about this?"
"But I cannot, my dear little martyr!" said Val, "and I must speak of it to her, at least, because it is involved in another story she must hear."
"In another story?"
"Yes, Miss Rose—for I suppose I must still call you by that name—in another story, stranger than anything you ever heard out of a novel. A cruel and shameful story of wrong and revenge, that I have come here to tell you this morning, and to which all this has been but the preface."
The governess lifted her pale, wondering face in mute inquiry, and Val began the story Paul Wyndham had related the night before. The brown eyes of the little governess dilated, and her lips parted as she listened, but she never spoke or interrupted him until he had finished. She sat with her clasped hands in her lap, her eyes never leaving his face, her lips apart and breathless.
"So you see, Miss Rose," Val wound up, "in telling that unfortunate girl at Redmon that she is not, and never has been, legally the wife of Paul Wyndham, it is of absolute impossibility to shirk the other story. Had she never falsely possessed herself of that to which she had no claim, this dishonor would have been saved her. She might have been poor, but not disgraced, as she is now."
"Oh, Mr. Blake! what have I heard? Nathalie Marsh alive and here?"
"Not Nathalie Marsh—Nathalie Wyndham. Whatever your stepsister may be, Nathalie at least is his lawful wife!"
"Oh, my poor, poor, Nathalie! And is she really insane—hopelessly insane?"
"Hopelessly, I fear, but she does not look as if her life would last long. She is only the shadow of what she was—a poor, thin, frail shadow.