"How?"
"I had been divorced while I was writing to him. A year ago he was to be in London, where I was to meet him. While he was sailing from the Cape of Good Hope I was being married to a man who loved me for myself, and to whom I had confided all. Instead of my address at the London post office he received a notification of my marriage, addressed to him in my own hand and mailed to him by myself. He wrote once or twice still, but my husband indorsed the letters with his own name and returned them unopened. He may be dead for all I know, but I hope and pray he is still alive, and will remain alive and love me for a thousand years."
She opened her arms, as if to hug her vengeance to her heart, and looked at me steadily with eyes that thrilled me with their lambent fire. No wonder the wretched vagabond loved her! What a doom his selfishness and his duplicity had invoked upon him! I believe if he could have seen her as I saw her then, so different from and better than he knew her to be, he would have gone mad on the spot. Poor Mrs. Dobb the first was indeed avenged.
We sipped our chocolate and talked of other things, as if such a being as Frank Dobb had never been. Her husband joined us and we made an evening of it at the theatre. I knew from the way he looked at me, and from the increased warmth of his manner, that he was conversant with his wife's having made a confidant of me. But I do not think he knew how far her confidence had gone. I have often wondered since if he knew how deep and fierce the hatred she carried for his predecessor was. There are things women will reveal to strangers which they will die rather than divulge to those they love.
I saw them off to Europe, for they were going to establish themselves in London, and I have never seen or directly heard from them since. But some months after their departure I received a letter from Robinson, who has been painting there ever since his picture made that great hit in the Salon of '7—.
"I have odd news for you," he wrote. "You remember Frank Dobb, who belonged to our old Pen and Pencil Club, and who ran away from that Cuban wife of his just before I left home? Well, about a year ago I met him in Fleet street, the shabbiest beggar you ever saw. He was quite tight and smelled of gin across the street. He was taking a couple of drawings to a penny dreadful office which he was making pictures for at ten shillings a piece. I went to see him once, in the dismalest street back of Drury Lane. He was doing some painting for a dealer, when he was sober enough, and of all the holes you ever saw his was it. I soon had to sit down on him, for he got into the habit of coming to see me and loafing around, making the studio smell like a pub, till I would lend him five shillings to go away. I heard nothing of him till the other day I came across an event which this from the Telegraph will explain."
The following newspaper paragraph was appended:
"The man who shot himself on the door-step of Mr. Bennerley Green, the West India merchant, last Monday, has been discovered to be an American who for some time has been employed furnishing illustrations to the lower order of publications here. He was known as Allan, but this is said to have been an assumed name. He is stated to be the son of a wealthy New Yorker, who discarded him in consequence of his habits of dissipation, and to have once been an artist of considerable prominence in the United States. All that is known of the suicide is the story told by the servant, who a few minutes after admitting his master and mistress upon their return from the theatre, heard the report of a pistol in the street, and on opening the door found the wretched man dead upon the step. The body was buried after the inquest at the charge of the eminent American artist, Mr. J. J. Robinson, A. R. A., who had known him in his better days."
The second husband of Mrs. Frank Dobb is Mr. Bennerley Green, the West India merchant.—The Continent.