“Charley.”
“God bless him! God bless him for his noble heart!” Molly cried, with streaming eyes. “Oh, Phebe, is it not noble in him to befriend me when they have all forsaken me?”
“I have stood by you, too, Mrs. Laurens. Do not forget my love although it is so humble,” cried the faithful maid.
Molly flung herself gratefully into her arms, and sobbed out her passionate thanks with raining tears.
“Yesterday I was rich in friends, but today I have no one but you, dear Phebe, and Doctor Charley,” she sighed.
“Oh, my dear, do not take it so hard. All will come right again. There now, lie down on your pillow, and let me bring you some breakfast,” she said, abruptly, to hide her emotion.
Molly lay there still and pale upon the pillow with quick tears raining from her forlorn eyes and drenching her cheeks.
“It will never come right again—how should it?” she moaned. “I am found out at last in my sin and punishment has fallen on me. Alas, the way of the transgressor is indeed hard.”
She had always known that discovery would come some time, that punishment would overtake her, that she would have to repent in dust and ashes for her strange sin; but that it would come like this, with this horrible disgrace upon its track she had no more dreamed than she had dreamed of being Queen of England, or any other impossible thing.
“I have been loved by him. I have lived with him, believed myself his wife. I am soon to bear a child to him, yet I am not his wife, never have been, and now he scorns and deserts me. Yet I brought it all upon myself by my ignorance and madness,” she sighed to herself, and so agonizing was this knowledge to the young, devoted heart that it was a wonder that it did not kill her outright. She would have been glad if it had done so, for death would have been a welcome relief from the anguish of soul and body that she was enduring.