Before he could reply Sir Simon and the admiral burst into the room.
“We found this on her dressing-table,” said the admiral, handing his nephew a note. Clide took it. A cold chill ran through his blood. He tore open the letter. It ran thus:
“Clide, I am going to leave you. I don't ask you to forgive me. You can never do that. But God help me! I shall suffer for having so wickedly deceived you. I should not have been worthy of you, even if I had been as true as I have been false. But I loved you, and I shall never love anybody else. Don't try [pg 748] to find me. You will never find me. Good-by, Clide. Forget me and be happy.
“Your wicked but remorseful and loving
Isabel.”
The letter dropped from the young man's hand, and he fell to the ground with a cry.
We return to Clide's journal:
The sun was shining over the sea—the strong-waved sea that washes the northern coast of France, the country of legends and cider, and gray ruins and chivalry, and all that survives in the France of to-day of the France of long ago, the “plaisant pays de France” that poets sang to Marie Stuart in her happy days of young queenhood. There to the right, as the steamer paddled towards the port, stood the cliff where William of Normandy harangued his Norsemen before they embarked with him to snatch from Harold by force the crown he had not been able by fraud to prevent his assuming. Dieppe lay twinkling in the sunlight below, a town of gossip and carved ivory and many odors. As we entered the harbor, a strain of wild, plaintive music came floating towards us from the shore. It was the hymn of the fishermen's wives, pulling the fishing smacks along the pier. Children were toddling by the side of the mothers, and clutching by the rope with their small fingers, while their shrill trebles piped in chorus with the elders. A pretty picture, if I had been in a mood to admire it. But the gloom within quenched all the brightness without.
The boat was steered alongside the quay, where half the town, it seemed to me, had assembled to jeer at our pea-green faces, as we emerged from our separate purgatories and staggered up the gangway. I never feel so thorough a misanthrope as when I see my fellow-creatures enjoying the humiliation of my steamboat misery, and hear them chuckling over me as I pass along the plank that leads from deck to dry land. On this particular occasion I remember with what a vehemence of hatred I resented their inhumanity, and I assumed as defiant an air as was compatible with my abject bodily and mental condition, as I marched on with my fellow-victims, and passed between two hedges of eager, staring eyes. My uncle was with me. But he was not abject. He was far removed from such a wretched infirmity as sea-sickness, and nothing but his kindheartedness prevented him from joining with the chucklers who were making merry at our expense. It was almost an aggravation of my own suffering to see the intensity of his sympathy, the way in which he was perpetually mounting guard beside me to ward off any random shaft that the chance remarks of others every now and then aimed at me.