The noble, honest young physician was amazed, dumfounded.
“How could she do it? I thought she loved him,” he said, but then remembering all Molly’s treachery in the past he was fain to believe what they said of her now.
“I was deceived in her. Her beauty and her apparent guilelessness led my judgment astray,” he decided, and a great indignation took possession of his mind against the girl whose part he had taken so nobly.
He wrote to his brother that she had not been worthy of his love, and that the only thing he could do now was to cast her from his heart.
Louise Barry said the same thing when they confided to her the secret of Molly’s flight.
“It is what I have expected all the time,” she said. “Molly never cared for Mr. Laurens. It was his money that tempted her, and she has found out now that John Keith’s love was more to her than gold. Mr. Laurens ought to cast her from his heart forever.”
“I have told him I should be glad if he would divorce her, but he will not agree to do so,” said Cecil’s mother.
“I wish he would,” said Louise, and the aspiration came from her heart.
She was secretly enraged and frightened at the failure of the scheme she had intrusted to Florine Dabol.
“As long as Molly Trueheart lives the sword of Damocles will be suspended by a single hair over my head,” she thought, angrily, and in her disappointment she had at first refused to pay the promised bribe to the Frenchwoman.