The squire paused again and drew from the inner pocket of his dressing-gown a small, square leather case, which he passed over to Clifford.
The young man took it with fingers that were trembling visibly, opened it and drew forth a soiled and yellow envelope addressed to Mr. Alfred H. Talford and in a hand which he instantly recognized to be his mother's.
Slipping the missive from the envelope, he unfolded it and read the following brief letter:
"Alfred: I know that you can never forgive me the wrong I am doing you, but, too late, I have learned that I love another and not you. When you receive this I shall be the wife of that other—you well know who. I wish I could have saved you this blow, so near the day that was set for our wedding; but I should have doubly wronged you had I remained and fulfilled my pledge to you, with my heart irrevocably elsewhere. Forget and forgive if you can. T.A."
Clifford was very pale as he perused these lines; which had crushed all the brightest hopes of the man before him and embittered and warped his whole life.
He sighed, and a feeling of sympathy thrilled his heart as he returned the epistle to its worn, leathern receptable and handed it back to his companion, while he told himself that there must be depths to the man's nature that he had never suspected, or he would not have preserved and carried about with him for so many years this relic of an old-time love.
The squire hesitated before taking it, glancing irresolutely from it to Clifford, as if half-ashamed of the tenacity with which he had clung to it, and was inclined to repudiate any further interests in it, but he finally put forth his hand to receive it and returned it to the pocket from which he had taken it.
"Then, my mother married your half-brother, Squire Talford," Clifford gravely observed, after a thoughtful pause, "and that makes you—"
"Yes, it makes me your uncle, or half-uncle, though perhaps the least said about the relationship the better," was the somewhat bitter reply. Then he resumed with pale, pain-drawn lips, which betrayed that it was no easy matter for him to lay bare these secrets of his heart; "You can, perhaps, imagine something of what that letter meant to me—it changed in one moment of time my whole life; it made a devil of me, and all the affection which I had previously entertained for those who had so wronged me turned to rankest hatred, and I vowed that I would some day make them conscious of the fact; that I would spare neither of them if the time ever came when I could set my heel upon them.
"That time came, at least for one, sooner than I expected. Meantime, I married a thrifty, sensible girl who made me a good wife. I'd got to have somebody to keep house for me and look out for things generally, for my mother was giving out; that last act of Bill's broke her heart as well as turned mine to stone. But she—my wife—didn't live so very long. I expect she found life rather disappointing, for she never seemed very chipper after the first month or two. So, when she died, I concluded I was better off alone, and, as Maria had been thoroughly trained in the ways of the house and farm, I concluded I'd fight it out by myself. But, to go back a little," he continued, his voice suddenly hardening again, a little note of regret having crept into it while he was speaking of his mother and his dead wife. "Mr. Abbot, Belle's father, was all broken up over her elopement; he had a long sickness, during which his business went to rack and ruin, and when he finally got out again he settled up the best he could and bought that little place where you spent the first thirteen years of your life, paying down what he could and giving a mortgage for the rest. I bought up that mortgage just as soon as I got wind of it, and that was the first grip I got toward paying off old scores. He and his wife lived there very quietly for a couple of years; then Mrs. Abbot died. Her husband struggled on alone for ten or eleven months longer, and then he gave up the battle.