"I have thought it all out. Listen! In the course of a few days you shall write to Mr. Drelincourt, informing him that you purpose taking a voyage to Madeira for the good of your health, which has been anything but satisfactory of late. We will go and stay there a month; but while on the return voyage Anna Drelincourt shall die, and shall be buried at sea, and on landing it will be my painful duty to inform Mr. Drelincourt of her demise. I think you said that his last letter to you was dated from Bordighera."
Her voice and manner were as dry and matter of fact as if she were explaining some detail of housekeeping, but when she had come to an end Anna sat and stared at her like one doubtful whether she had heard aright.
"Why do you look at me so strangely?" asked her mother, after a minute's silence. "There is no other way open to us that I can see. Can you discern any other?"
Anna shook her head. "No," she said faintly, "I cannot."
"You do not know, you cannot comprehend," resumed Mrs. Jenwyn--and now there was a ring of genuine emotion in her voice--"what I have gone through in the course of the last few days, since I knew that this money was coming to me. On the one hand was my promise to Mrs. Drelincourt not to reveal the secret of your birth, except under very exceptional circumstances; on the other was a mother's heart hungering and crying out for her child. There is no one left alive to whom the death of Anna Drelincourt will be a matter of much moment. Mr. Felix Drelincourt will grieve about her for a little while, but her fortune will make a handsome addition to his income, and he may perhaps derive some consolation from that.
"And so--and so at length I came to the determination to tell you everything. I wanted to claim you as my own--my very own. I wanted to break down the invisible barrier which has kept us apart for too many years. Oh, my darling, do not tell me that I have done wrong!"
"Wrong, mother! How can you imagine such a thing?" cried Anna, as she burst into tears and flung her arms round Mrs. Jenwyn's neck. "In gaining you I have gained everything. All else is as nothing compared with that."
The audacious scheme conceived by Mrs. Jenwyn was carried to a successful issue. To Felix Drelincourt in his Italian home came the tidings of his half sister's death on shipboard while on her way back from Madeira. He grieved sincerely for her loss, and wrote Mrs. Jenwyn a letter full of sympathy, regrets, and grateful acknowledgment of her services to the dead girl. Before leaving England Anna had made a will, in which she bequeathed all she possessed, with the exception of a few trinkets, to Drelincourt. This step was rendered necessary by the peculiar circumstances of the case.
The money which thus accrued to him made a very welcome addition to Drelincourt's somewhat limited income. After the reading of the will he wrote to Mrs. Jenwyn, expressing his surprise and regret that, except so far as regarded the aforesaid trinkets, her name found no mention in it, and offering to continue to her for life the income his father had set aside for her so long as she and Anna should remain together. In reply, Mrs. Jenwyn informed him, with many thanks, that, by the death of a relative, she had recently succeeded to a legacy which would amply suffice to meet all her simple needs in time to come.
And there matters between them came to an end forever, as they probably thought, neither of them foreseeing where and under what peculiar circumstances they should meet again, nor having any prevision of the underlying purpose for which fate had interwoven the threads of their destiny.