"I told you, Mrs. Laurence, I have been sent here on a hard and painful errand. He sent me. 'Conscience makes cowards of us all.' He is a coward as well as a villain, and he had not the courage to face you himself. You have been watching and waiting for his return, I know. Watch and wait no longer; you will never see Laurence Thorndyke again."
A cry broke from her lips—a cry that rang in his ears his life long—a cry not loud, but exceedingly bitter.
"In Heaven's name, speak and tell me what is it you mean?"
"This: You are not a wife—Laurence Thorndyke never married you. He deceived and betrayed you from the first; he has deserted you forever at the last. That is the task he has set me. I am but a poor diplomat to break bad news, as they call it, to any one, so I blurt out the truth at once. After all, it is the same in the end. He never meant to marry you—he never cared for you enough. He hated Richard Gilbert—that was the beginning and end of it. He hated Gilbert, Gilbert loved you, and was about to make you his wife; to revenge himself on Gilbert, he went back to Kent Hill and carried you off. He knew you loved him, and it would not be a difficult task. It seems easy enough for all women to love Laurence Thorndyke."
The last words, spoken more to himself than to her, were full of bitterness. A great stillness had fallen upon her—her eyes were fixed on his face, her own strained and fixed.
"Go on," she said, her teeth set hard.
"He took you away—how, you know best, and in Boston that mockery of marriage was gone through. Miss Bourdon the man Maggs was an actor, not a clergyman, a besotted drunkard, whom fifty dollars at any time would buy, rotten body and a filthy soul. 'She is as green as the fields she came from'; that is what Thorndyke said to Maggs, 'as innocent as her native daisies. She'll never know the difference, but she's one of the sort that will love a fellow to desperation, and all that sort of thing, and cry like a water-spout at parting, but who won't listen to a word without her wedding ring. Let her have her wedding ring—always take a short cut on a journey if you can.' So you got your wedding ring, and without license or witnesses, and by a half-drunken actor a sham ceremony was gone through. You were married to the scoundrel, for the sake of whose handsome face you gave up home and friends, and the love and honor of such a man as Richard Gilbert—one of the best and noblest men America holds to-day!"
The hand, pressed over her heart, clutched it tighter, as if in a spasm of uncontrollable pain.
"Go on," she said again.
"There's not much to tell. He brought you here, and in a week was bored to death and sick of it all. He was only too glad of the chance to go, and—he will never come back. Here is his note—read it—here is the money he gave me, to pay your board and take you back to your home in Maine. He thinks it is the best thing you can do."