“Have I deserved this,” she cried, “that you in smiling guise should come to me as an emblem of happiness? You have stolen my love from me, and oh, your poor, poor, wretched wife!”
She was a good, honest, womanly girl, and even in her own anguish of heart did not forget she was not the only sufferer from such treachery.
In a torrent of words he told her how he had married when a student at the ’Varsity—married beneath him—how his life had ever since been misery. How the pretty girl-bride had developed into a vulgar woman, how for years she and her still commoner family had dogged his footsteps, how he had paid and paid to be rid of her, how his whole existence had been ruined by the indiscretion of his youth, and the wiles of the designing landlady’s daughter, how he had never felt respect and love for woman until he had met her, Number II. on the Left.
It was a tragic moment in both their lives. He felt the awful sin he had committed in not telling her from the first that he could never marry. He felt the injustice of it all, the punishment for his own folly that had fallen upon him, and she, poor soul, not only realised the shock to her ideal, but the horrible barrier that had risen between them.
They travelled up to town together, both silent—each feeling that all the world was changed. They parted at Victoria—she would not let him see her home.
The idol of two years was rudely shattered, the happy dreams of life had suddenly turned to miserable reality.
He returned to his chambers, where he cursed himself, and cursed his luck, as he walked up and down his rooms all night, and realised the root of the misery lay in the deception he had practised. He, whose life had been ruined by the deception of a designing, low-class minx, had himself in his turn committed the selfsame sin of misrepresentation. The thought was maddening; his remorse intense. But alack! the past cannot be recalled, and the curse that had followed him for many years he had, alas! cast over a sinless girl.
Sarah Hopper returned to her cheap little lodging at Islington, for after two years’ hard work her salary was still only 30s. a week, and throwing herself into an arm-chair, she sat and thought. Her head throbbed as if it would burst, her eyes seemed on fire as she reviewed the whole story from every possible side. She had been a blind fool; she had trusted in a man she believed a good man, the web of fate had entangled her, and this—this was the end. She could never see him again.