[¹] Copyright, Dodd, Mead & Co.
FTER donning velvet jacket and slippers he sat down, and, lighting his cigar, leaned back to watch the fire and dream of Salome and their real home.
Not until the weed was half consumed did he observe an envelope on the table at his elbow. It was sealed and addressed to him in a “back-hand” he did not recognize:
“In the Library. Nine O’clock, P. M.
“My Own Love—You say in your letter (burned as soon as I had committed the contents to memory) that I must never call you that again. There is a higher law than that of man’s appointment, binding our hearts together, stronger even than that of your sweet, wise lips. Until you are actually married to the man whom you confess you do not love, you will, according to that divine law, be my own Marion—”
With a violent start, the young man shook the sheet from his fingers as he would a serpent.
This was what he had promised not to read, or so much as to touch! The veins stood out high and dark on his forehead; he drew in the air hissingly. Had a basilisk uncoiled from his bosom and thrust a forked tongue in his face the shock would not have been greater. This was “the letter written to Marion!” He had thrown away six of the best years of his life upon the woman whom another man called his “own love;” the man to whom she had confessed that she did not love her betrothed husband! Who was he?
“If they are genuine, respect for the dead and mercy to the living require that they should be suppressed and destroyed,” Mrs. Phelps had said of “papers written a little while before Marion’s death.” His word was pledged. But what name would he see if he reversed the sheet before destroying it? With a bound of the heart that would have assured him, had proof been needed, what his bonnie living girl-love was to him, he put away all tender memories of the dead, false betrothed. He had worshipped and mourned the thinnest of shadows. He might owe respect—abstractly—to the dead, but no reverence to a wild dream from which he had been awakened. Who was the “living” to whom he was entreated to show mercy? Where was the man who had first robbed him, then let him play the sad-visaged dupe and fool, while the heyday of youth slipped forever beyond his reach?
To learn that—to remember the name with execration—to despise with the full force of a wronged and honest soul—perhaps to brand him as a cur and blackguard, should he ever cross his path—would not break his word. Was it not his right—the poor rag of compensation he might claim for the incalculable, the damnable evil the traitor had wrought? He would confess to Salome’s mother to-morrow—but this one thing he would do.