"What a terrible life!" said St. John, musingly. "Not one man in a thousand could have borne what he did; it was almost heroic, and yet I think my first impression was that he was common-place."
"I don't understand," said Missy, "tell me."
"It isn't possible you don't know about his wife?"
So St. John told her something that she certainly hadn't known before about his wife. St. John had learned it from others; the story had been pretty well known in an English town where he had been the year before, and had come to him in ways that put it beyond any doubt. Mr. Andrews had married a young woman, of French extraction, of whom nobody seemed to know anything, but that she was distractingly pretty. After three or four years she had proved to be the very worst woman that could be imagined. She had a lover, who was the father of Gabrielle; she had married just in time to conceal her shame from the world and from her husband. They went to Europe after the little girl's birth, and in about two years Jay was born. When he was a few months old, the suspicions of the husband were aroused by some accidental circumstance. The lover had followed them, and had renewed his correspondence with her. Some violent scenes occurred. She professed penitence and promised amendment. Her next move was a bungling conspiracy with her lover to poison her husband. A horrid exposé of the whole thing threatened. It was with difficulty suppressed, the man fled, leaving her to bear all. In her rage and despair she took poison, and barely escaped dying. It was managed that the thing never came to trial. Mr. Andrews, out of pity for the miserable creature, whose health was permanently destroyed by her mad act, resolved not to abandon her to destruction. His love for his little son, and his compassion for the poor little bastard girl, induced him still to shelter her, and to keep up the fiction of a home for their sakes.
"I don't think," said St. John, "one could fancy a finer action. Protecting the woman who had attempted his life, adopting the child who had been palmed off upon him, establishing a home which must have been full of bitterness all the time. There are not many men who could have done this. It seems to me utter self-renunciation. Doesn't it seem so to you?"
"How long have you known this?" cried Missy, bursting into tears. "Oh! St. John, if you had only told me! You might have saved me from being—so unjust."
CHAPTER XXVII.
SANCTUARY.
