"What is it that is the matter with him?"
"In my opinion it is a broken heart. He has fretted himself away. Think what existence has been for him. In exile under a false name; no home, no comfort, an innocent man's death upon his conscience; and living, whether at home or abroad, in the ever-perpetual dread of being called upon to answer publicly for what has been called murder. The doctors call it decline. He is a living shadow."
"And Mrs. Chandos is his wife! Oh, poor thing, what a life of sadness hers must be!"
"Mrs. Chandos was his wife; in one sense of the word is his wife still, for she bears his name," he gravely answered. "But I have a word to say to you, Anne, respecting Mrs. Chandos. Mrs. Penn—I shall begin to doubt whether every word and action of that woman be not false, put forth with a covert motive—informed you Mrs. Chandos was my wife,flashing. knowing perfectly well the contrary. Mrs. Chandos was never my wife, Anne, but she was once my love."
A chill stole over my heart.
"I met with her when she was Ethel Wynne, a lovely, soft-mannered girl, and I learned to love her with impassioned fervour. We became engaged, and were to be married later: I was only two-and-twenty then, she seventeen. She came to Heneage Grange on a visit, she and her elder sister, since dead. Little thought I that my sweet, soft-mannered girl was eaten up with ambition. One morning at breakfast a letter was brought in to my father. It was from India, and contained news of the death of my brother Tom; which, I need not tell you, who know that he is alive yet, was premature. Captain Heneage had been in action, the letter stated, was desperately wounded, and taken up for dead. Tom wrote us word afterwards that it was only when they went to bury him that they discovered he was alive. But he is given to joking. Well, we mourned him as dead; and George, in his free, careless manner, told Ethel she had better have engaged herself to him than to me, for that he could make her Lady Heneage being the heir now, which Harry never could. That George had always admired her, was certain. He had a weakness for pretty women. But for that weakness, and Mrs. Edwin Barley's being pretty, Philip King might be alive now."
Mr. Chandos paused a moment, and then went on in a lower tone, bending rather nearer to me: "Anne, will you believe that in less than two weeks' time they had gone away together?"
"Who had?"
"George Heneage and Ethel Wynne. They had gone to be married. When they returned, man and wife, my mother, Lady Heneage, would have refused to receive them, but Sir Thomas, ever lenient to us all, persuaded her. A marriage entered into as theirs had been would bring plenty of punishment in its wake, he observed. The punishment—for Ethel, at any rate—had already begun. She liked me best, far best, but ambition had temporarily blinded her. She married George on the strength of his being heir apparent to the title, and news had now arrived that my brother Thomas was alive, and progressing steadily towards health."
"And you—what did you do?" I interrupted.