He had received no letters from his wife; she had had none from him; and, with that dreadful scandal and rumor to crush her, to say nothing of having been driven from the shelter with which he had provided her, what must she not have suffered?
"Will you read this notice, sir?" Mr. Eldridge asked, pushing the paper nearer to the baronet, and desiring to intrench himself behind as many bulwarks as possible.
Sir William bent forward and read it, and he did not wonder then, that Virgie had felt herself the most wronged of women.
He knew that it had been intended as the announcement of his cousin's marriage with Margaret Stanhope, but a grave mistake had been made in prefixing the young man's name with a title, thus making it appear that it was the baronet who had been married.
Virgie did not know that he had a relative by the same name, so, of course, taking everything else into consideration, she must have believed that he had been false to all honor, to his manhood, and to her.
He groaned aloud.
"Oh, what must she have thought of me!" he cried, in despair. Then, turning to the proprietor of the hotel, he asked, "Where did you get this paper?"
It was the Hampshire County Journal, and he wondered how it could have got to New York to accomplish so much mischief.
"I cannot say, sir. I found it in my office here among other papers, and—and you must confess that such a notice as that was sufficient to stagger me when I read it."
"Yes," Sir William admitted, white to his lips, "and yet it was heartless to send her away. It was my cousin—a gentleman bearing the same name—who was married; but some one made a mistake and added my title. Did she see that notice?"