It seemed to Evelyn as if her spirit and courage were entirely gone from her, and she could never hold up her head again. She had recoiled when he pushed her away, but now came tremblingly back, and looked at it as at a death warrant. Ah! no delusion—no fancy—it was as clear as the cold dreary daylight that poured in upon them through the great window—as clear as that Mary’s boy, who had looked so honest, who had faced his accuser with such rage of upright indignation, who had approached with such an unsuspecting look of innocence, as clear as that the boy——
“No, no, no!” she cried out. “I will not believe my senses, James! There is something in it more than we know.”
“Ay!” he said, “Ay, I well believe that—something more than you and me know, or perhaps could understand—though he’s but twenty. Do you hear, Evelyn—only twenty, with plenty of time——”
“Yes,” she cried, clasping her husband’s hand, upon which her tears fell heavily, “plenty, plenty of time, thank God, to repent.”
“To do more, and to do worse,” he said, “repent! I believe in that when I see it—but never before. Plenty of time to drag down my honour to the dust—to make my name a byeword—to lay my pride low. Oh, plenty of time for that, and a good beginning.”
He took a large envelope out of one of the drawers of the table at which he was sitting, and methodically arranging the cheque in the place from which it had been torn, at the end of the book, placed the cheque-book in the envelope, and fastening it up, locked it into a private drawer.
“There!” he said, “that is done with, Evelyn. We’ll say no more about it. We’ll just disperse, my dear, you to your farm and me to my merchandize. The incident is over. It’s ended and done with. If we can forget it, so much the better. It’s not very long to have had the delusion of a—a—son in the house. It’s well it has been so short a time. Now that chapter’s closed, and there’s no more to be said.”
“James! you will not abandon the boy for the first error—the first slip?”
“Error—slip! I would like to know what kind of a moral code you have,” he said with a smirk. “An error would be—perhaps staying out too late at night—perhaps forgetting himself after dinner. I would not cast him off for a slip like that. And if he asks me for money, he shall have it, enough to keep him. But as for the slip of a lad of twenty who signs another man’s name to a cheque for a thousand pounds——”
“Oh, what does the sum matter?” she cried.