"In spite of all,
"I am for ever yours--and yours only,
"WILLIAM."
Unlike his father's letter, there was no hypocrisy in this, no stupid form of words. When he wrote that all happiness for him was over, he meant it; and he wrote truly. Perhaps he deserved no less: but, if he merited blame, judgment might accord him some pity with it.The afternoon was drawing to itsWhen Mary received the letters, she felt certain of their contents before a word was seen. Sir Richard would not himself have written but to break off the engagement. He had not even called upon her in all these long weary days of desolation and misery: and there could be but one motive for this unkind neglect. His note would now explain it.
But when she came to read its contents: its hollow hypocrisy, its plausible, specious argument, its profession of friendship and devotion; the pang of the death-blow gave place to the highest anger and indignation.
At that moment of bitterness the letter sounded to her desperately hollow and cruel, worse perhaps than it even was. The pain was more than her wounded spirit--so tried in the past few weeks--could bear; and with a brief but violent storm of sobs, with which no tears came, she tore the letter in two and threw it into the fire.
"At least he might have done it differently," she said to herself in her anguish. "He might have written in a manner that would have made me feel it less."
It was one of her first lessons in the world's harshness, in the selfish nature of man. Happy for her if in her altered circumstances she had not many such to learn!
Presently, when she had grown a little calm, she opened the other note, almost wondering whether it would be a repetition of the cool falsity of Sir Richard's. Ah no, no!
"I will see him," she said, when she read the few words. "But the interview shall be brief. Of what use to prolong the agony?" So when William Blake-Gordon, true to his appointment, reached the bank at four o'clock, he was admitted.