“Poor Pete! The good woman here thinks he's hard. Perhaps he is; but I'm sure he is much to be pitied. Ross has behaved badly and deserves all that can come to him. 'He's the same to me as you are, dear—in blood, I mean—but somehow I can't be sorry.... Ah! you're too tender-hearted, Philip, indeed you are. You'd find excuses for anybody. The doctor says overwork, dearest; but I say the shock of seeing that poor creature in that awful position. And what a shock you gave me, too! To tell you the truth, Philip, I thought it was a fate. Never heard of it? No? Never heard that grandfather fainted on the bench? He did, though, and he didn't recover either. How well I remember it! Word broke over the town like a clap of thunder, 'The Deemster has fallen in the Court-house.' Father heard it up at Ballure and ran down bareheaded. Grandfather's carriage was at the Courthouse door, and they brought him up to Ballawhaine. I remember I was coming downstairs when I saw the carriage draw up at the gate. The next minute your father, with his wild eyes and his bare head, was lifting something out of the inside. Poor Tom! He had never set foot in the house since grandfather had driven him out of it. And little did grandfather think in whose arms he was to travel the last stage of his life's journey.”
Philip had fallen asleep. Jem-y-Lord entered with a letter. It was in a large envelope and had come by the insular post.
“Shall I open it?” thought Auntie Nan. She had been opening and replying to Philip's letters during the time of his illness, but this one bore an official seal, and so she hesitated. “Shall I?” she thought, with the knitting needle to her lip. “I will. I may save him some worry.”
She fixed her glasses and drew out the letter. It was a summons from the Chancery Division of the High Court of Justice—a petition for divorce. The petitioner's name was Peter Quilliam; the respondent——, the co respondent——.
As Philip awoke from his doze, with the salt breath of the sea in his nostrils and the songs of spring in his ears, Auntie Nan was fumbling with the paper to get it back into the envelope. Her hands trembled, and when she spoke her voice quivered. Philip saw in a moment what had happened. She had stumbled into the pit where the secret of his life lay buried.
The doctor came in at that instant. He looked attentively at Auntie Nan, and said significantly, “You have been nursing too long, Miss Christian, you must go home for a while.”
“I will go home at once,” she faltered, in a feeble inward voice.
Philip's head was on his breast. Such was the first step on the Calvary he intended to ascend. O God, help him! God support him! God bear up his sinking feet that he might not fall from weakness, or fear, or shame.