"I am afraid," he began, "that my coming so unexpectedly must have startled you a little, but I thought it was best not to write."
Mrs. Costello could not help smiling—she was quite conscious of her tactics having been surpassed by Maurice's.
"I am glad to see you, at any rate," she said, "now you are here; but" she added seriously, "you must not forget, nor try to tempt me to forget, that we are all changed since we met last."
"I do not wish it. I don't wish to forget anything that is true and real, and I wish to remind you that when I left Canada I did so with a promise—an implied promise at any rate—from you, which has not been kept."
"Maurice! Have you a right to speak to me so?"
"I think I have. Dear Mrs. Costello, have some consideration for me. Was it right when I was kept a fast prisoner by my poor grandfather's sick-bed, when I was trusting to you, and doing all I could to make you to trust me—was it fair to break faith with me, and try to deprive me of all the hopes I had in the world? Just think of it—was it fair?"
"I broke no faith with you. I felt that I had let you pledge yourself in the dark; that in my care for Lucia, and confidence in you, I had to some extent bound you to a discreditable engagement. I released you from it; I told you the truth of the story I had hidden from everybody—I wrote to you when my husband lay in jail waiting his trial for murder, and I heard no more from you. It was natural, prudent, right that you should accept the separation I desired—you did so, and I have only taken means to make it effectual."
"I did so! I accepted the separation?"
"I supposed, at least, from your silence that you did so. Was not I right therefore in desiring that you and Lucia should not meet again?"
"That was it, then? Listen, Mrs. Costello. My last note to you seems by some means to have been lost. There was nothing new in it; but my father has told me that he was surprised on receiving my letter which ought to have contained it, to find nothing for you, not even a message; perhaps you wondered too. I can only tell you the note was written. Then, in my next letter, written when my grandfather was actually dying, and when I was, I confess, very angry that you should persist in trying to shake me off, there was a message to you in a postscript which my father overlooked, and which I myself showed to him for the first time when I reached home and found you gone. What he had been thinking, Heaven knows. I had rather not inquire too closely; but I will say that it is rather hard to find that the people who ought to know one best, cannot trust one for six months."