After his guests had all departed, when the house was silent and quiet and lonely, and he was quite by himself, Henry Werner smoothed out that crumpled manuscript and read the sentences Dolly had written in her haste.
There was much she had better have left unwritten, as there is in all such effusions, much that was feminine and foolish, and passionate and exaggerated. But it ended with two sentences which burned themselves on Mr. Werner's brain.
"If it were not for your sake, darling, I would wish that the man you have had the misfortune to marry might be beggared and ruined to-morrow—beggared, more completely ruined, more utterly even than we have been.
"As it is, I shall never forgive him—never for ever—never.
"Dolly."
With a shiver Mr. Werner folded up Dolly's epistle and placed it in his pocket-book. Then he did a most unwonted thing for him; indeed, I might say unprecedented,—he poured out nearly a glass of brandy and drank it off.
"After all," he thought, "there is more in having a wife who is fond of her husband than most fellows think. That little woman is as brave over her sick husband as a hen about a brood of young chickens. I wonder if she has taken him back to Homewood; or rather I do not wonder, for I know she would sooner do anything than that."
And in this idea he was perfectly correct; Dolly had found a shelter for her sick husband, but not at Homewood.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE BEGINNING OF A NEW LIFE.
Off one of the cross roads leading from Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill to Upper Clapton, there stood a few years back, and still stand, for aught the writer knows to the contrary, a few pairs of semi-detached houses, undoubtedly respectable as to position and appearance, but painfully small in their internal arrangement—houses suitable both as regarded rent and position for a couple of maiden ladies, for a widow and her son, for a newly married couple, or for any one in fact whose family chanced to be as circumscribed in number as his income in amount.