“Richard,” interrupted Mr. Carlyle, “there’s an old saying, and it is sound advice: ‘Tell the whole truth to your lawyer and your doctor.’ If I am to judge whether anything can be attempted for you, you must tell it to me; otherwise, I would rather hear nothing. It shall be sacred trust.”
“Then, if I must, I must,” returned the yielding Richard. “I did love the girl. I would have waited till I was my own master to make her my wife, though it had been for years and years. I could not do it, you know, in the face of my father’s opposition.”
“Your wife?” rejoined Mr. Carlyle, with some emphasis.
Richard looked surprised. “Why, you don’t suppose I meant anything else! I wouldn’t have been such a blackguard.”
“Well, go on, Richard. Did she return your love?”
“I can’t be certain. Sometimes I thought she did, sometimes not; she used to play and shuffle, and she liked too much to be with—him. I would think her capricious—telling me I must not come this evening, and I must not come the other; but I found out they were the evenings when she was expecting him. We were never there together.”
“You forget that you have not indicted ‘him’ by any name, Richard. I am at fault.”
Richard Hare bent forward till his black whiskers brushed Mr. Carlyle’s shoulder. “It was that cursed Thorn.”
Mr. Carlyle remembered the name Barbara had mentioned. “Who was Thorn? I never heard of him.”
“Neither had anybody else, I expect, in West Lynne. He took precious good care of that. He lives some miles away, and used to come over in secret.”