“Poor Henry!” said Garde, with a little smile to herself. She knew what to expect in the document and vaguely she wondered if she would not feel more at peace when she had consented to become his wife. Her memory of words and looks, behind which the figure of Adam, the sad boy-captive, the love-irradiated champion of her cat, and then the melancholy violinist in the woods—this had all, of late, been more than usually strong upon her.
Garde’s cat had died within the week just passed. This event had served to open up old tombs, containing her dead dreams. She had almost caught herself wishing she had taken less to heart the story of Adam’s perfidy, or at least that she might never have heard the story at all. But when she had shaken off the spell which this past would persist in weaving about her, she was resolved to accept Henry Wainsworth, so that her duty might compel her to forget.
With a half melancholy sense of sealing her own sentence of banishment from her land of bitter-sweet memories, she delayed the moment of unfolding Henry’s letter. When she found herself alone, she laid it down before her, on the table, and looked at it with lackluster eyes. But presently, then, having tossed off the reverie which was stealing upon her, she sighed once, heavily, and took up the papers with a resolute hand.
She opened the stiff sheets and bent them straight. She read “Dear friend,” and thought Henry’s writing had altered. Her eyes then sped along a number of lines and she started with a new, tense interest in the document.
The letter she held in her hands was the one which Adam Rust had penned to Wainsworth, concerning his brother.
“Why!” she presently said, aloud, “why—he couldn’t have meant—” yet Henry, she recalled, had asked her particularly to read all the pages through.
She had only made a start into Adam’s narrative, yet her heart had begun to leap till she could barely endure its commotion. She spread the sheets out before her on the table, with nervous fingers. She read swiftly, greedily. Her bosom heaved with the tumult of suddenly stirred emotions. She made a glad little noise, as she read, for the undercurrent of her thought was of a wild exultation to find that Adam was innocent, that she was justified in loving him now, as she had been justified always—that her instinct had guided her rightly when she had helped him to break from the prison.
Her eyes were widely dilated. Her pent-up emotions swayed her till she suddenly clutched up the sheets and crumpled them in joy against her bounding heart.
“Adam!” she said, half aloud. “Oh, Adam! My Adam!”
She bent above the letter again, crooning involuntarily, in the revelation of Adam made again his noble self by the lines he had written so simply and innocently here upon the paper. She was reading, but having, almost in the first few lines, discovered so much that her intuition had far out-raced her eyes, she was hardly comprehending the sentences that ran so swiftly beneath her gaze, so abandoned were her senses to the sudden hope and the overwhelming joy which the revelation compelled. She kissed the papers. She laid her cheek upon them, she surrounded them warmly with her arms.