“A very deep one, probably. You don’t know her as well as I do, or you would suspect all her actions of ulterior motive.”
“Well,” I said, after a pause, “to tell the truth, I wrote to Ethelwynn last night with a view to reconciliation.”
“You did!” she cried joyously. “Then you have anticipated me, and my appeal to you has been forestalled by your own conscience—eh?”
“Exactly,” I laughed. “She has my letter by this time, and I am expecting a wire in reply. I have asked her to meet me at the earliest possible moment.”
“Then you have all my felicitations, Ralph,” she said, in a voice that seemed to quiver with emotion. “She loves you—loves you with a fiercer and even more passionate affection than that I entertained towards my poor dead husband. Of your happiness I have no doubt, for I have seen how you idolised her, and how supreme was your mutual content when in each other’s society. Destiny, that unknown influence that shapes our ends, has placed you together and forged a bond between you that is unbreakable—the bond of perfect love.”
There seemed such a genuine ring in her voice, and she spoke with such solicitude for our welfare, that in the conversation I entirely forgot that after all she was only trying to bring us together again in order to prevent her own secret from being exposed.
At some moments she seemed the perfection of honesty and integrity, without the slightest affectation of interest or artificiality of manner, and it was this fresh complexity of her character that utterly baffled me. I could not determine whether, or not, she was in earnest.
“If it is really destiny I suppose that to try and resist it is quite futile,” I remarked mechanically.
“Absolutely. Ethelwynn will become your wife, and you have all my good wishes for prosperity and happiness.”
I thanked her, but pointed out that the matrimonial project was, as yet, immature.