She only smiled superciliously, with the same mysterious look—an expression that I cannot define, but by which I knew that she had told me the crushing truth. Ethelwynn, believing that I had cast her aside, had allowed herself to be loved by another!
Who was the man who had usurped my place? I deserved it all, without a doubt. You, reader, have already in your heart condemned me as being hard and indifferent towards the woman I once loved so truly and so well. But, in extenuation, I would ask you to recollect how grave were the suspicions against her—how every fact seemed to prove conclusively that her sister’s husband had died by her hand.
I saw plainly in Mrs. Henniker’s veiled words a statement of the truth; and, after obtaining from her Ethelwynn’s address near Hereford, bade her farewell and blindly left the house.
CHAPTER XX.
MY NEW PATIENT.
In the feverish restlessness of the London night, with its rumbling market-wagons and the constant tinkling of cab-bells, so different to the calm, moonlit stillness of the previous night in rural England, I wrote a long explanatory letter to my love.
I admitted that I had wronged her by my apparent coldness and indifference, but sought to excuse myself on the ground of the pressure of work upon me. She knew well that I was not a rich man, and in that slavery to which I was now tied I had an object—the object I had placed before her in the dawning days of our affection—namely, the snug country practice with an old-fashioned comfortable house in one of the quiet villages or smaller towns in the Midlands. In those days she had been just as enthusiastic about it as I had been. She hated town life, I knew; and even if the wife of a country doctor is allowed few diversions, she can always form a select little tea-and-tennis circle of friends.
The fashion nowadays is for girls of middle-class to regard the prospect of becoming a country doctor’s wife with considerable hesitation—“too slow,” they term it; and declare that to live in the country and drive in a governess-cart is synonymous with being buried. Many girls marry just as servants change their places—in order “to better themselves;” and alas! that parents encourage this latter-day craze for artificiality and glitter of town life that so often fascinates and spoils a bride ere the honeymoon is over. The majority of girls to-day are not content to marry the hard-working professional man whose lot is cast in the country, but prefer to marry a man in town, so that they may take part in the pleasures of theatres, variety and otherwise, suppers at restaurants, and the thousand and one attractions provided for the reveller in London. They have obtained their knowledge of “life” from the society papers, and they see no reason why they should not taste of those pleasures enjoyed by their wealthier sisters, whose goings and comings are so carefully chronicled. The majority of girls have a desire to shine beyond their own sphere; and the attempt, alas! is accountable for very many of the unhappy marriages. This may sound prosy, I know, but the reader will forgive when he reflects upon the cases in point which arise to his memory—cases of personal friends, perhaps even of relations, to whom marriage was a failure owing to this uncontrollable desire on the part of the woman to assume a position to which neither birth nor wealth entitled her.