Her husband looked up at last, noting a change in the tone of her exclamation. She stood looking in an embarrassed way at the address on the envelope she held. It was in Ancram’s handwriting.
“What letter?” he asked.
She handed it to him, and at the sight of it he frowned a little.
“Is the newspaper the Bengal Free Press?”
“Yes,” she said, glancing at it. “And it’s marked in one or two places with red pencil.”
“Then read them both,” Doyle replied. “They don’t tell a very pretty story, but it may amuse you. I thought I had destroyed them long ago. I can’t have worn that coat since I left Florence.”
Rhoda sat down, with a beating curiosity, and applied herself to understand the story that was not very pretty. It sometimes annoyed her that she could not resist her interest in things that concerned Ancram, especially things that exemplified him. She brought her acutest intelligence to bear upon the exposition of the letter and the newspaper; but it was very plain and simple, especially where it was underscored in red pencil, and she comprehended it at once.
She sat thinking of it, with bright eyes, fitting it into relation with what she had known and guessed before, perhaps unconsciously pluming herself a little upon her penetration, and, it must be confessed, feeling a keen thrill of unregretting amusement at Ancram’s conviction. Then suddenly, with a kind of mental gasp, she remembered Judith Church.
“Ah!” she said to herself, and her lips almost moved. “What a complication!” And then darted up from some depth of her moral consciousness the thought, “She ought to know, and I ought to tell her.”
She tried to look calmly at the situation, and analyse the character of her responsibility. She sought for its pros and cons; she made an effort to range them and to balance them. But, in spite of herself, her mind rejected everything save the memory of the words she had overheard one soft spring night on the verandah at Government House: