"Olive went off to Stammars one morning with a letter from you," resumes the old lady. "An hour later you rush off after her, although you have not been out of your room for two months. You come back after a time, but Olive does not. Next day she sends for her boxes, but from the hour when she set out for Stammars till now, I have never set eyes on Olive Deane."
"Yes, it must have seemed strange to you," says Mr. Kelvin, after a pause; "but the subject was such a very painful one that I always felt reluctant to mention it."
"You never thought, dear, how painful it must be to me to be left in such a state of doubt and uncertainty."
"I know that I ought to have told you long ago. I will tell you now." He pauses while he looks at his watch and folds up his newspaper. "The facts of the case can be told you in very few words," he says. "Olive Deane, during the time that I was ill, suppressed a very important private letter that had been sent to me through the post."
"That was wrong, very wrong indeed," says the old lady, gravely. "Had any other than you told me of it, I could not have believed them."
"That morning when she went to Stammars it was with a letter from me addressed to Miss Lloyd. That letter she also suppressed, after having, I presume, opened it and read it. I was very angry with her indeed. I spoke my mind very strongly on the point, and we parted--never, I hope, to meet again."
Mrs. Kelvin does not speak, and Matthew, looking up, sees that her eyes are full of tears. "How would she feel, and what would she say, if she knew everything?" he asks himself. "But she must never be told."
"What you have just told me has pained me deeply," she says at last. "But what a strange thing to do! What could her motive possibly be? I believed in her as implicitly as if she had been my own child. And then how kind and attentive she was during your illness!" Matthew shudders. "She was simply invaluable to me at that time. And so fond of you, too! And now you tell me these strange things about her. I--I can't understand it at all."
"The subject is a very painful one to both of us. Suppose we say nothing more about it," says Matthew, speaking very gently.
"I thought it strange that she never once mentions your name in her letter," says Mrs. Kelvin, as she wipes her eyes. "It is just as well to know that the girl is not without a home. She writes me that she has accepted a situation with a family who are going out to the Hague in a couple of months; so that she is not likely to trouble any of us in time to come."