“He will tell me now of that most shameful marriage,” Pansy thought; but again she was mistaken.
“Poor little darling! No wonder she felt so gloomy, for our parting was the knell of her fate,” said Norman Wylde. “I feel quite sure that by some underhand means our letters to each other were suppressed, for not a line ever came to me, though I shall never doubt that she wrote often, and I feel quite certain that it was the agony of suspense and hope deferred that drove her to suicide.”
“You came home, then, did you not?” she asked.
“No; for I could not have borne to return and find her gone. What was there to come back to, Mrs. Falconer? Not even a grave, for her body was never recovered from the river.”
He raised his downcast eyes and looked into her face with such a searching expression that she trembled lest he was going to tax her with her identity.
But he did not do so. He only said:
“I was too miserable and distracted to come home then. Besides, I had not yet discovered the fraud that had been perpetrated on me. I stayed in London almost a year longer, vainly prosecuting my search for the missing links in my client’s case, and then, by accident, I found out how I had been deceived. I came home at once then, and taxed my parents with the truth. They acknowledged the deception, but claimed that it had been done for my good, and begged my pardon. I would not forgive them, yet, for the sake of family pride, I kept secret their perfidy, and you are the first one to whom it has been revealed.”
“Oh, what a sad, what a miserable ending for so sweet a love story! It seems a pity you did not marry the girl and take her away with you!” cried Pansy.
“I wish that I had done so, for then I might have been happy, instead of the most miserable and remorseful man in the whole world,” groaned Norman Wylde; and she wondered how much of this was acting and how much reality.
“Perhaps he loved me better than he knew, and repented when too late the miserable betrayal that wrecked my life,” she thought, softening more and more toward him whom she knew she ought to hate.