“Oh, what is it? Have I killed you?” she gasped faintly.
“It is nothing—a slight spasm of the heart, brought on by excitement. I am better now,” Colonel Falconer replied coldly, and just then the door opened and Mrs. Finley came nervously into the room.
“Mamma, this is Colonel Falconer,” Pansy half whispered, adding anxiously: “I have told you how good he has been to me, and I have told him who and what I am, but briefly. Now I want you to tell him the story of my willful girlhood, and the full extent of my sin.”
“Will you listen, sir?” asked the pale, gray-haired little woman timidly.
A dark frown came between his eyebrows, but he answered impatiently:
“Yes.”
And so, in the little room where Pansy lay, pale with pain and despair, the story of her girlhood was told to the husband she had deceived—told kindly and gently by her mother’s lips, yet without abating one jot of the truth.
“If she had taken her mother’s advice, sir, she would never have come to this pass. I told her that a rich young man like Mr. Wylde wouldn’t think of marrying a poor little factory girl, but she didn’t believe my warning. She wouldn’t heed me,” sighed poor Mrs. Finley, when she had told, in her pitiful little way, the story of Pansy’s willfulness and disobedience.
But she, poor thing, looked pleadingly at her pale, silent husband.
“But you see how it was, don’t you?” she cried imploringly. “I loved him so, and I fell under his fascinations so that I couldn’t help myself; and I thought mother would be so pleased when she found out I was his wife she would forgive all the rest. Ah, Heaven! I paid dearly, dearly for that disobedience!”