Now it so happened that Mrs. Mortomley chanced, without any reference to Mrs. Werner, to know Lord Darsham's then address, and consequently the moment she got into town she telegraphed this message to him.
"Leonora's husband has committed suicide. Pray come to her at once."
Mrs. Mortomley only sent this message because she considered that, by stating what she believed to be the literal truth, she would bring Leonora's cousin more rapidly to her assistance. In the then state of her nerves, sudden death by the Visitation of God seemed to her so slight a misfortune that she fancied pure death would appear a trifle to Lord Darsham.
That any one could ever really have supposed Mr. Werner died through illness or misadventure, never occurred to Dolly, who felt quite positive he had fully made up his mind to destroy himself when with her on the preceding day, and it was therefore with a frightful shock she learned upon arriving at her friend's house that every soul in it believed Mr. Werner, who was suffering from a severe attack of neuralgia, had died accidentally while inhaling chloroform to lull the pain.
"What a dreadful thing I have done!" she thought. "How shall I ever be able to make it right with Lord Darsham?" And then Dolly went upstairs into that very room where Mr. and Mrs. Werner had held their colloquy about the Mortomleys, and found Mrs. Werner as nearly insane as a rational woman can ever be.
She was full of self-reproach, and Dolly thanked God for it. Knowing what she knew of the man's misery, it would have tried her almost beyond endurance to have listened to the faintest whisper of self-pity, but there was none.
Nothing save sorrow for the husband, taken so suddenly, for his children left orphaned, for the years during which she might have made him happier.
"I thought myself a good wife," she moaned, "but I was not a good wife. I helped him as I imagined, but, Dolly dear, an ounce of love is worth a pound of pride any day. He wanted, he must have wanted, something more when he returned to this great cold, handsome house than a woman to sit at the head of his dinner table. I have thought about it all at Dassell, Dolly darling. I made up my mind, God helping me, to be more a wife to him than I had ever been, and it is all too late—too late—too late."
"I am afraid he had a great deal on his mind," Dolly ventured.