"I got your letter, Harry," she replied.
"My letter?" he repeated. "Oh! my dear, you got my letter, and you saw that your husband loved you still."
"I could not keep away from you, Harry, whatever had happened. I stayed as long as I could. I thought about you day and night. And at last I—I—I came back. Are you angry with me, Harry?"
"Angry? Good God! my dearest, angry?" He kissed her passionately—not the less passionately that she had returned at a time so terrible. What was he to say to her? How was he to tell her? While he showered kisses on her he was asking himself these questions. When she found out—when he should confess to her the whole truth—she would leave him again. Yet he did not understand the nature of the woman who loves. He held her in his arms; his kisses pleaded for him; they mastered her—she was ready to believe, to accept, to surrender even her truth and honesty; and she was ready, though she knew it not, to become the accomplice of a crime. Rather than leave her husband again, she would do everything.
Yet, Lord Harry felt there was one reservation: he might confess everything, except the murder of the Dane. No word of confession had passed the doctor's lips, yet he knew too well that the man had been murdered; and, so far as the man had been chosen for his resemblance to himself, that was perfectly useless, because the resemblance, though striking at the first, had been gradually disappearing as the man Oxbye grew better; and was now, as we have seen, wholly lost after death.
"I have a great deal—a great deal—to tell you, dear," said the husband, holding both her hands tenderly. "You will have to be very patient with me. You must make up your mind to be shocked at first, though I shall be able to convince you that there was really nothing else to be done—nothing else at all."
"Oh! go on, Harry. Tell me all. Hide nothing."
"I will tell you all," he replied.
"First, where is that poor man whom the doctor brought here and Fanny nursed? And where is Fanny?"
"The poor man," he replied carelessly, "made so rapid a recovery that he has got on his legs and gone away—I believe, to report himself to the hospital whence he came. It is a great triumph for the doctor, whose new treatment is now proved to be successful. He will make a grand flourish of trumpets about it. I dare say, if all he claims for it is true, he has taken a great step in the treatment of lung diseases."