The Two Destinies

CHAPTER X. SAINT ANTHONY’S WELL.

I STOOD on the rocky eminence in front of the ruins of Saint Anthony’s Chapel, and looked on the magnificent view of Edinburgh and of the old Palace of Holyrood, bathed in the light of the full moon.

The Well, as the doctor’s instructions had informed me, was behind the chapel. I waited for some minutes in front of the ruin, partly to recover my breath after ascending the hill; partly, I own, to master the nervous agitation which the sense of my position at that moment had aroused in me. The woman, or the apparition of the woman—it might be either—was perhaps within a few yards of the place that I occupied. Not a living creature appeared in front of the chapel. Not a sound caught my ear from any part of the solitary hill. I tried to fix my whole attention on the beauties of the moonlit view. It was not to be done. My mind was far away from the objects on which my eyes rested. My mind was with the woman whom I had seen in the summer-house writing in my book.

I turned to skirt the side of the chapel. A few steps more over the broken ground brought me within view of the Well, and of the high boulder or rock from the foot of which the waters gushed brightly in the light of the moon.

She was there.

I recognized her figure as she stood leaning against the rock, with her hands crossed in front of her, lost in thought. I recognized her face as she looked up quickly, startled by the sound of my footsteps in the deep stillness of the night.

Was it the woman, or the apparition of the woman? I waited, looking at her in silence.

She spoke. The sound of her voice was not the mysterious sound that I had heard in the summer-house. It was the sound I had heard on the bridge when we first met in the dim evening light.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

As those words passed her lips, she recognized me. “You here!” she went on, advancing a step, in uncontrollable surprise. “What does this mean?”

“I am here,” I answered, “to meet you, by your own appointment.”

She stepped back again, leaning against the rock. The moonlight shone full upon her face. There was terror as well as astonishment in her eyes while they now looked at me.

“I don’t understand you,” she said. “I have not seen you since you spoke to me on the bridge.”

“Pardon me,” I replied. “I have seen you—or the appearance of you—since that time. I heard you speak. I saw you write.”

She looked at me with the strangest expression of mingled resentment and curiosity. “What did I say?” she asked. “What did I write?”

“You said, ‘Remember me. Come to me.’ You wrote, ‘When the full moon shines on Saint Anthony’s Well.’”

“Where?” she cried. “Where did I do that?”

“In a summer-house which stands by a waterfall,” I answered. “Do you know the place?”

Her head sunk back against the rock. A low cry of terror burst from her. Her arm, resting on the rock, dropped at her side. I hurriedly approached her, in the fear that she might fall on the stony ground.

She rallied her failing strength. “Don’t touch me!” she exclaimed. “Stand back, sir. You frighten me.”

I tried to soothe her. “Why do I frighten you? You know who I am. Can you doubt my interest in you, after I have been the means of saving your life?”

Her reserve vanished in an instant. She advanced without hesitation, and took me by the hand.

“I ought to thank you,” she said. “And I do. I am not so ungrateful as I seem. I am not a wicked woman, sir—I was mad with misery when I tried to drown myself. Don’t distrust me! Don’t despise me!” She stopped; I saw the tears on her cheeks. With a sudden contempt for herself, she dashed them away. Her whole tone and manner altered once more. Her reserve returned; she looked at me with a strange flash of suspicion and defiance in her eyes. “Mind this!” she said, loudly and abruptly, “you were dreaming when you thought you saw me writing. You didn’t see me; you never heard me speak. How could I say those familiar words to a stranger like you? It’s all your fancy—and you try to frighten me by talking of it as if it was a real thing!” She changed again; her eyes softened to the sad and tender look which made them so irresistibly beautiful. She drew her cloak round her with a shudder, as if she felt the chill of the night air. “What is the matter with me?” I heard her say to herself. “Why do I trust this man in my dreams? And why am I ashamed of it when I wake?”

That strange outburst encouraged me. I risked letting her know that I had overheard her last words.

“If you trust me in your dreams, you only do me justice,” I said. “Do me justice now; give me your confidence. You are alone—you are in trouble—you want a friend’s help. I am waiting to help you.”

She hesitated. I tried to take her hand. The strange creature drew it away with a cry of alarm: her one great fear seemed to be the fear of letting me touch her.

“Give me time to think of it,” she said. “You don’t know what I have got to think of. Give me till to-morrow; and let me write. Are you staying in Edinburgh?”

I thought it wise to be satisfied—in appearance at least—with this concession. Taking out my card, I wrote on it in pencil the address of the hotel at which I was staying. She read the card by the moonlight when I put it into her hand.

“George!” she repeated to herself, stealing another look at me as the name passed her lips. “‘George Germaine.’ I never heard of ‘Germaine.’ But ‘George’ reminds me of old times.” She smiled sadly at some passing fancy or remembrance in which I was not permitted to share. “There is nothing very wonderful in your being called ‘George,’” she went on, after a while. “The name is common enough: one meets with it everywhere as a man’s name And yet—” Her eyes finished the sentence; her eyes said to me, “I am not so much afraid of you, now I know that you are called ‘George.’”

So she unconsciously led me to the brink of discovery!

If I had only asked her what associations she connected with my Christian name—if I had only persuaded her to speak in the briefest and most guarded terms of her past life—the barrier between us, which the change in our names and the lapse of ten years had raised, must have been broken down; the recognition must have followed. But I never even thought of it; and for this simple reason—I was in love with her. The purely selfish idea of winning my way to her favorable regard by taking instant advantage of the new interest that I had awakened in her was the one idea which occurred to my mind.

“Don’t wait to write to me,” I said. “Don’t put it off till to-morrow. Who knows what may happen before to-morrow? Surely I deserve some little return for the sympathy that I feel with you? I don’t ask for much. Make me happy by making me of some service to you before we part to-night.”

I took her hand, this time, before she was aware of me. The whole woman seemed to yield at my touch. Her hand lay unresistingly in mine; her charming figure came by soft gradations nearer and nearer to me; her head almost touched my shoulder. She murmured in faint accents, broken by sighs, “Don’t take advantage of me. I am so friendless; I am so completely in your power.” Before I could answer, before I could move, her hand closed on mine; her head sunk on my shoulder: she burst into tears.

Any man, not an inbred and inborn villain, would have respected her at that moment. I put her hand on my arm and led her away gently past the ruined chapel, and down the slope of the hill.

“This lonely place is frightening you,” I said. “Let us walk a little, and you will soon be yourself again.”

She smiled through her tears like a child.

“Yes,” she said, eagerly. “But not that way.” I had accidentally taken the direction which led away from the city; she begged me to turn toward the houses and the streets. We walked back toward Edinburgh. She eyed me, as we went on in the moonlight, with innocent, wondering looks. “What an unaccountable influence you have over me!” she exclaimed.

“Did you ever see me, did you ever hear my name, before we met that evening at the river?”

“Never.”

“And I never heard your name, and never saw you before. Strange! very strange! Ah! I remember somebody—only an old woman, sir—who might once have explained it. Where shall I find the like of her now?”

She sighed bitterly. The lost friend or relative had evidently been dear to her. “A relation of yours?” I inquired—more to keep her talking than because I felt any interest in any member of her family but herself.

We were again on the brink of discovery. And again it was decreed that we were to advance no further.

“Don’t ask me about my relations!” she broke out. “I daren’t think of the dead and gone, in the trouble that is trying me now. If I speak of the old times at home, I shall only burst out crying again, and distress you. Talk of something else, sir—talk of something else.”

The mystery of the apparition in the summer-house was not cleared up yet. I took my opportunity of approaching the subject.

“You spoke a little while since of dreaming of me,” I began. “Tell me your dream.”

“I hardly know whether it was a dream or whether it was something else,” she answered. “I call it a dream for want of a better word.”

“Did it happen at night?”

“No. In the daytime—in the afternoon.”

“Late in the afternoon?”

“Yes—close on the evening.”

My memory reverted to the doctor’s story of the shipwrecked passenger, whose ghostly “double” had appeared in the vessel that was to rescue him, and who had himself seen that vessel in a dream.

“Do you remember the day of the month and the hour?” I asked.

She mentioned the day, and she mentioned the hour. It was the day when my mother and I had visited the waterfall. It was the hour when I had seen the apparition in the summer-house writing in my book!

I stopped in irrepressible astonishment. We had walked by this time nearly as far on the way back to the city as the old Palace of Holyrood. My companion, after a glance at me, turned and looked at the rugged old building, mellowed into quiet beauty by the lovely moonlight.

“This is my favorite walk,” she said, simply, “since I have been in Edinburgh. I don’t mind the loneliness. I like the perfect tranquillity here at night.” She glanced at me again. “What is the matter?” she asked. “You say nothing; you only look at me.”

“I want to hear more of your dream,” I said. “How did you come to be sleeping in the daytime?”

“It is not easy to say what I was doing,” she replied, as we walked on again. “I was miserably anxious and ill. I felt my helpless condition keenly on that day. It was dinner-time, I remember, and I had no appetite. I went upstairs (at the inn where I am staying), and lay down, quite worn out, on my bed. I don’t know whether I fainted or whether I slept; I lost all consciousness of what was going on about me, and I got some other consciousness in its place. If this was dreaming, I can only say it was the most vivid dream I ever had in my life.”

“Did it begin by your seeing me?” I inquired.

“It began by my seeing your drawing-book—lying open on a table in a summer-house.”

“Can you describe the summer-house as you saw it?”

She described not only the summer-house, but the view of the waterfall from the door. She knew the size, she knew the binding, of my sketch-book—locked up in my desk, at that moment, at home in Perthshire!

“And you wrote in the book,” I went on. “Do you remember what you wrote?”

She looked away from me confusedly, as if she were ashamed to recall this part of her dream.

“You have mentioned it already,” she said. “There is no need for me to go over the words again. Tell me one thing—when you were at the summer-house, did you wait a little on the path to the door before you went in?”

I had waited, surprised by my first view of the woman writing in my book. Having answered her to this effect, I asked what she had done or dreamed of doing at the later moment when I entered the summer-house.

“I did the strangest things,” she said, in low, wondering tones. “If you had been my brother, I could hardly have treated you more familiarly. I beckoned to you to come to me. I even laid my hand on your bosom. I spoke to you as I might have spoken to my oldest and dearest friend. I said, ‘Remember me. Come to me.’ Oh, I was so ashamed of myself when I came to my senses again, and recollected it. Was there ever such familiarity—even in a dream—between a woman and a man whom she had only once seen, and then as a perfect stranger?”

“Did you notice how long it was,” I asked, “from the time when you lay down on the bed to the time when you found yourself awake again?”

“I think I can tell you,” she replied. “It was the dinner-time of the house (as I said just now) when I went upstairs. Not long after I had come to myself I heard a church clock strike the hour. Reckoning from one time to the other, it must have been quite three hours from the time when I first lay down to the time when I got up again.”

Was the clew to the mysterious disappearance of the writing to be found here?

Looking back by the light of later discoveries, I am inclined to think that it was. In three hours the lines traced by the apparition of her had vanished. In three hours she had come to herself, and had felt ashamed of the familiar manner in which she had communicated with me in her sleeping state. While she had trusted me in the trance—trusted me because her spirit was then free to recognize my spirit—the writing had remained on the page. When her waking will counteracted the influence of her sleeping will, the writing disappeared. Is this the explanation? If it is not, where is the explanation to be found?

We walked on until we reached that part of the Canongate street in which she lodged. We stopped at the door.

CHAPTER XI. THE LETTER OF INTRODUCTION.

I LOOKED at the house. It was an inn, of no great size, but of respectable appearance. If I was to be of any use to her that night, the time had come to speak of other subjects than the subject of dreams.

“After all that you have told me,” I said, “I will not ask you to admit me any further into your confidence until we meet again. Only let me hear how I can relieve your most pressing anxieties. What are your plans? Can I do anything to help them before you go to rest to-night?”

She thanked me warmly, and hesitated, looking up the street and down the street in evident embarrassment what to say next.

“Do you propose staying in Edinburgh?” I asked.

“Oh no! I don’t wish to remain in Scotland. I want to go much further away. I think I should do better in London; at some respectable milliner’s, if I could be properly recommended. I am quick at my needle, and I understand cutting out. Or I could keep accounts, if—if anybody would trust me.”

She stopped, and looked at me doubtingly, as if she felt far from sure, poor soul, of winning my confidence to begin with. I acted on that hint, with the headlong impetuosity of a man who was in love.

“I can give you exactly the recommendation you want,” I said, “whenever you like. Now, if you would prefer it.”

Her charming features brightened with pleasure. “Oh, you are indeed a friend to me!” she said, impulsively. Her face clouded again—she saw my proposal in a new light. “Have I any right,” she asked, sadly, “to accept what you offer me?”

“Let me give you the letter,” I answered, “and you can decide for yourself whether you will use it or not.”

I put her arm again in mine, and entered the inn.

She shrunk back in alarm. What would the landlady think if she saw her lodger enter the house at night in company with a stranger, and that stranger a gentleman? The landlady appeared as she made the objection. Reckless what I said or what I did, I introduced myself as her relative, and asked to be shown into a quiet room in which I could write a letter. After one sharp glance at me, the landlady appeared to be satisfied that she was dealing with a gentleman. She led the way into a sort of parlor behind the “bar,” placed writing materials on the table, looked at my companion as only one woman can look at another under certain circumstances, and left us by ourselves.

It was the first time I had ever been in a room with her alone. The embarrassing sense of her position had heightened her color and brightened her eyes. She stood, leaning one hand on the table, confused and irresolute, her firm and supple figure falling into an attitude of unsought grace which it was literally a luxury to look at. I said nothing; my eyes confessed my admiration; the writing materials lay untouched before me on the table. How long the silence might have lasted I cannot say. She abruptly broke it. Her instinct warned her that silence might have its dangers, in our position. She turned to me with an effort; she said, uneasily, “I don’t think you ought to write your letter to-night, sir.”

“Why not?”

“You know nothing of me. Surely you ought not to recommend a person who is a stranger to you? And I am worse than a stranger. I am a miserable wretch who has tried to commit a great sin—I have tried to destroy myself. Perhaps the misery I was in might be some excuse for me, if you knew it. You ought to know it. But it’s so late to-night, and I am so sadly tired—and there are some things, sir, which it is not easy for a woman to speak of in the presence of a man.”

Her head sunk on her bosom; her delicate lips trembled a little; she said no more. The way to reassure and console her lay plainly enough before me, if I chose to take it. Without stopping to think, I took it.

Reminding her that she had herself proposed writing to me when we met that evening, I suggested that she should wait to tell the sad story of her troubles until it was convenient to her to send me the narrative in the form of a letter. “In the mean time,” I added, “I have the most perfect confidence in you; and I beg as a favor that you will let me put it to the proof. I can introduce you to a dressmaker in London who is at the head of a large establishment, and I will do it before I leave you to-night.”

I dipped my pen in the ink as I said the words. Let me confess frankly the lengths to which my infatuation led me. The dressmaker to whom I had alluded had been my mother’s maid in former years, and had been established in business with money lent by my late step-father, Mr. Germaine. I used both their names without scruple; and I wrote my recommendation in terms which the best of living women and the ablest of existing dressmakers could never have hoped to merit. Will anybody find excuses for me? Those rare persons who have been in love, and who have not completely forgotten it yet, may perhaps find excuses for me. It matters little; I don’t deserve them.

I handed her the open letter to read.

She blushed delightfully; she cast one tenderly grateful look at me, which I remembered but too well for many and many an after-day. The next moment, to my astonishment, this changeable creature changed again. Some forgotten consideration seemed to have occurred to her. She turned pale; the soft lines of pleasure in her face hardened, little by little; she regarded me with the saddest look of confusion and distress. Putting the letter down before me on the table, she said, timidly:

“Would you mind adding a postscript, sir?”

I suppressed all appearance of surprise as well as I could, and took up the pen again.

“Would you please say,” she went on, “that I am only to be taken on trial, at first? I am not to be engaged for more”—her voice sunk lower and lower, so that I could barely hear the next words—“for more than three months, certain.”

It was not in human nature—perhaps I ought to say it was not in the nature of a man who was in my situation—to refrain from showing some curiosity, on being asked to supplement a letter of recommendation by such a postscript as this.

“Have you some other employment in prospect?” I asked.

“None,” she answered, with her head down, and her eyes avoiding mine.

An unworthy doubt of her—the mean offspring of jealousy—found its way into my mind.

“Have you some absent friend,” I went on, “who is likely to prove a better friend than I am, if you only give him time?”

She lifted her noble head. Her grand, guileless gray eyes rested on me with a look of patient reproach.

“I have not got a friend in the world,” she said. “For God’s sake, ask me no more questions to-night!”

I rose and gave her the letter once more—with the postscript added, in her own words.

We stood together by the table; we looked at each other in a momentary silence.

“How can I thank you?” she murmured, softly. “Oh, sir, I will indeed be worthy of the confidence that you have shown in me!” Her eyes moistened; her variable color came and went; her dress heaved softly over the lovely outline of her bosom. I don’t believe the man lives who could have resisted her at that moment. I lost all power of restraint; I caught her in my arms; I whispered, “I love you!” I kissed her passionately. For a moment she lay helpless and trembling on my breast; for a moment her fragrant lips softly returned the kiss. In an instant more it was over. She tore herself away with a shudder that shook her from head to foot, and threw the letter that I had given to her indignantly at my feet.

“How dare you take advantage of me! How dare you touch me!” she said. “Take your letter back, sir; I refuse to receive it; I will never speak to you again. You don’t know what you have done. You don’t know how deeply you have wounded me. Oh!” she cried, throwing herself in despair on a sofa that stood near her, “shall I ever recover my self-respect? shall I ever forgive myself for what I have done to-night?”

I implored her pardon; I assured her of my repentance and regret in words which did really come from my heart. The violence of her agitation more than distressed me—I was really alarmed by it.

She composed herself after a while. She rose to her feet with modest dignity, and silently held out her hand in token that my repentance was accepted.

“You will give me time for atonement?” I pleaded. “You will not lose all confidence in me? Let me see you again, if it is only to show that I am not quite unworthy of your pardon—at your own time; in the presence of another person, if you like.”

“I will write to you,” she said.

“To-morrow?”

“To-morrow.”

I took up the letter of recommendation from the floor.

“Make your goodness to me complete,” I said. “Don’t mortify me by refusing to take my letter.”

“I will take your letter,” she answered, quietly. “Thank you for writing it. Leave me now, please. Good-night.”

I left her, pale and sad, with my letter in her hand. I left her, with my mind in a tumult of contending emotions, which gradually resolved themselves into two master-feelings as I walked on: Love, that adored her more fervently than ever; and Hope, that set the prospect before me of seeing her again on the next day.

CHAPTER XII. THE DISASTERS OF MRS. VAN BRANDT.

A MAN who passes his evening as I had passed mine, may go to bed afterward if he has nothing better to do. But he must not rank among the number of his reasonable anticipations the expectation of getting a night’s rest. The morning was well advanced, and the hotel was astir, before I at last closed my eyes in slumber. When I awoke, my watch informed me that it was close on noon.

I rang the bell. My servant appeared with a letter in his hand. It had been left for me, three hours since, by a lady who had driven to the hotel door in a carriage, and had then driven away again. The man had found me sleeping when he entered my bed-chamber, and, having received no orders to wake me overnight, had left the letter on the sitting-room table until he heard my bell.

Easily guessing who my correspondent was, I opened the letter. An inclosure fell out of it—to which, for the moment, I paid no attention. I turned eagerly to the first lines. They announced that the writer had escaped me for the second time: early that morning she had left Edinburgh. The paper inclosed proved to be my letter of introduction to the dressmaker returned to me.

I was more than angry with her—I felt her second flight from me as a downright outrage. In five minutes I had hurried on my clothes and was on my way to the inn in the Canongate as fast as a horse could draw me.

The servants could give me no information. Her escape had been effected without their knowledge.

The landlady, to whom I next addressed myself, deliberately declined to assist me in any way whatever.

“I have given the lady my promise,” said this obstinate person, “to answer not one word to any question that you may ask me about her. In my belief, she is acting as becomes an honest woman in removing herself from any further communication with you. I saw you through the keyhole last night, sir. I wish you good-morning.”

Returning to my hotel, I left no attempt to discover her untried. I traced the coachman who had driven her. He had set her down at a shop, and had then been dismissed. I questioned the shop-keeper. He remembered that he had sold some articles of linen to a lady with her veil down and a traveling-bag in her hand, and he remembered no more. I circulated a description of her in the different coach offices. Three “elegant young ladies, with their veils down, and with traveling-bags in their hands,” answered to the description; and which of the three was the fugitive of whom I was in search, it was impossible to discover. In the days of railways and electric telegraphs I might have succeeded in tracing her. In the days of which I am now writing, she set investigation at defiance.

I read and reread her letter, on the chance that some slip of the pen might furnish the clew which I had failed to find in any other way. Here is the narrative that she addressed to me, copied from the original, word for word:

“DEAR SIR—Forgive me for leaving you again as I left you in Perthshire. After what took place last night, I have no other choice (knowing my own weakness, and the influence that you seem to have over me) than to thank you gratefully for your kindness, and to bid you farewell. My sad position must be my excuse for separating myself from you in this rude manner, and for venturing to send you back your letter of introduction. If I use the letter, I only offer you a means of communicating with me. For your sake, as well as for mine, this mu st not be. I must never give you a second opportunity of saying that you love me; I must go away, leaving no trace behind by which you can possibly discover me.

“But I cannot forget that I owe my poor life to your compassion and your courage. You, who saved me, have a right to know what the provocation was that drove me to drowning myself, and what my situation is, now that I am (thanks to you) still a living woman. You shall hear my sad story, sir; and I will try to tell it as briefly as possible.

“I was married, not very long since, to a Dutch gentleman, whose name is Van Brandt. Please excuse my entering into family particulars. I have endeavored to write and tell you about my dear lost father and my old home. But the tears come into my eyes when I think of my happy past life. I really cannot see the lines as I try to write them.

“Let me, then, only say that Mr. Van Brandt was well recommended to my good father before I married. I have only now discovered that he obtained these recommendations from his friends under a false pretense, which it is needless to trouble you by mentioning in detail. Ignorant of what he had done, I lived with him happily. I cannot truly declare that he was the object of my first love, but he was the one person in the world whom I had to look up to after my father’s death. I esteemed him and respected him, and, if I may say so without vanity, I did indeed make him a good wife.

“So the time went on, sir, prosperously enough, until the evening came when you and I met on the bridge.

“I was out alone in our garden, trimming the shrubs, when the maid-servant came and told me there was a foreign lady in a carriage at the door who desired to say a word to Mrs. Van Brandt. I sent the maid on before to show her into the sitting-room, and I followed to receive my visitor as soon as I had made myself tidy. She was a dreadful woman, with a flushed, fiery face and impudent, bright eyes. ‘Are you Mrs. Van Brandt?’ she said. I answered, ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you really married to him?’ she asked me. That question (naturally enough, I think) upset my temper. I said, ‘How dare you doubt it?’ She laughed in my face. ‘Send for Van Brandt,’ she said. I went out into the passage and called him down from the room upstairs in which he was writing. ‘Ernest,’ I said, ‘here is a person who has insulted me. Come down directly.’ He left his room the moment he heard me. The woman followed me out into the passage to meet him. She made him a low courtesy. He turned deadly pale the moment he set eyes on her. That frightened me. I said to him, ‘For God’s sake, what does this mean?’ He took me by the arm, and he answered: ‘You shall know soon. Go back to your gardening, and don’t return to the house till I send for you.’ His looks were so shocking, he was so unlike himself, that I declare he daunted me. I let him take me as far as the garden door. He squeezed my hand. ‘For my sake, darling,’ he whispered, ‘do what I ask of you.’ I went into the garden and sat me down on the nearest bench, and waited impatiently for what was to come.

“How long a time passed I don’t know. My anxiety got to such a pitch at last that I could bear it no longer. I ventured back to the house.

“I listened in the passage, and heard nothing. I went close to the parlor door, and still there was silence. I took courage, and opened the door.

“The room was empty. There was a letter on the table. It was in my husband’s handwriting, and it was addressed to me. I opened it and read it. The letter told me that I was deserted, disgraced, ruined. The woman with the fiery face and the impudent eyes was Van Brandt’s lawful wife. She had given him his choice of going away with her at once or of being prosecuted for bigamy. He had gone away with her—gone, and left me.

“Remember, sir, that I had lost both father and mother. I had no friends. I was alone in the world, without a creature near to comfort or advise me. And please to bear in mind that I have a temper which feels even the smallest slights and injuries very keenly. Do you wonder at what I had it in my thoughts to do that evening on the bridge?

“Mind this: I believe I should never have attempted to destroy myself if I could only have burst out crying. No tears came to me. A dull, stunned feeling took hold like a vise on my head and on my heart. I walked straight to the river. I said to myself, quite calmly, as I went along, ‘There is the end of it, and the sooner the better.’

“What happened after that, you know as well as I do. I may get on to the next morning—the morning when I so ungratefully left you at the inn by the river-side.

“I had but one reason, sir, for going away by the first conveyance that I could find to take me, and this was the fear that Van Brandt might discover me if I remained in Perthshire. The letter that he had left on the table was full of expressions of love and remorse, to say nothing of excuses for his infamous behavior to me. He declared that he had been entrapped into a private marriage with a profligate woman when he was little more than a lad. They had long since separated by common consent. When he first courted me, he had every reason to believe that she was dead. How he had been deceived in this particular, and how she had discovered that he had married me, he had yet to find out. Knowing her furious temper, he had gone away with her, as the one means of preventing an application to the justices and a scandal in the neighborhood. In a day or two he would purchase his release from her by an addition to the allowance which she had already received from him: he would return to me and take me abroad, out of the way of further annoyance. I was his wife in the sight of Heaven; I was the only woman he had ever loved; and so on, and so on.

“Do you now see, sir, the risk that I ran of his discovering me if I remained in your neighborhood? The bare thought of it made my flesh creep. I was determined never again to see the man who had so cruelly deceived me. I am in the same mind still—with this difference, that I might consent to see him, if I could be positively assured first of the death of his wife. That is not likely to happen. Let me get on with my letter, and tell you what I did on my arrival in Edinburgh.

“The coachman recommended me to the house in the Canongate where you found me lodging. I wrote the same day to relatives of my father, living in Glasgow, to tell them where I was, and in what a forlorn position I found myself.

“I was answered by return of post. The head of the family and his wife requested me to refrain from visiting them in Glasgow. They had business then in hand which would take them to Edinburgh, and I might expect to see them both with the least possible delay.

“They arrived, as they had promised, and they expressed themselves civilly enough. Moreover, they did certainly lend me a small sum of money when they found how poorly my purse was furnished. But I don’t think either husband or wife felt much for me. They recommended me, at parting, to apply to my father’s other relatives, living in England. I may be doing them an injustice, but I fancy they were eager to get me (as the common phrase is) off their hands.

“The day when the departure of my relatives left me friendless was also the day, sir, when I had that dream or vision of you which I have already related. I lingered on at the house in the Canongate, partly because the landlady was kind to me, partly because I was so depressed by my position that I really did not know what to do next.

“In this wretched condition you discovered me on that favorite walk of mine from Holyrood to Saint Anthony’s Well. Believe me, your kind interest in my fortunes has not been thrown away on an ungrateful woman. I could ask Providence for no greater blessing than to find a brother and a friend in you. You have yourself destroyed that hope by what you said and did when we were together in the parlor. I don’t blame you: I am afraid my manner (without my knowing it) might have seemed to give you some encouragement. I am only sorry—very, very sorry—to have no honorable choice left but never to see you again.

“After much thin king, I have made up my mind to speak to those other relatives of my father to whom I have not yet applied. The chance that they may help me to earn an honest living is the one chance that I have left. God bless you, Mr. Germaine! I wish you prosperity and happiness from the bottom of my heart; and remain, your grateful servant,

“P.S.—I sign my own name (or the name which I once thought was mine) as a proof that I have honestly written the truth about myself, from first to last. For the future I must, for safety’s sake, live under some other name. I should like to go back to my name when I was a happy girl at home. But Van Brandt knows it; and, besides, I have (no matter how innocently) disgraced it. Good-by again, sir; and thank you again.”

So the letter concluded.

I read it in the temper of a thoroughly disappointed and thoroughly unreasonable man. Whatever poor Mrs. Van Brandt had done, she had done wrong. It was wrong of her, in the first place, to have married at all. It was wrong of her to contemplate receiving Mr. Van Brandt again, even if his lawful wife had died in the interval. It was wrong of her to return my letter of introduction, after I had given myself the trouble of altering it to suit her capricious fancy. It was wrong of her to take an absurdly prudish view of a stolen kiss and a tender declaration, and to fly from me as if I were as great a scoundrel as Mr. Van Brandt himself. And last, and more than all, it was wrong of her to sign her Christian name in initial only. Here I was, passionately in love with a woman, and not knowing by what fond name to identify her in my thoughts! “M. Van Brandt!” I might call her Maria, Margaret, Martha, Mabel, Magdalen, Mary—no, not Mary. The old boyish love was dead and gone, but I owed some respect to the memory of it. If the “Mary” of my early days were still living, and if I had met her, would she have treated me as this woman had treated me? Never! It was an injury to “Mary” to think even of that heartless creature by her name. Why think of her at all? Why degrade myself by trying to puzzle out a means of tracing her in her letter? It was sheer folly to attempt to trace a woman who had gone I knew not whither, and who herself informed me that she meant to pass under an assumed name. Had I lost all pride, all self-respect? In the flower of my age, with a handsome fortune, with the world before me, full of interesting female faces and charming female figures, what course did it become me to take? To go back to my country-house, and mope over the loss of a woman who had deliberately deserted me? or to send for a courier and a traveling carriage, and forget her gayly among foreign people and foreign scenes? In the state of my temper at that moment, the idea of a pleasure tour in Europe fired my imagination. I first astonished the people at the hotel by ordering all further inquiries after the missing Mrs. Van Brandt to be stopped; and then I opened my writing desk and wrote to tell my mother frankly and fully of my new plans.

The answer arrived by return of post.

To my surprise and delight, my good mother was not satisfied with only formally approving of my new resolution. With an energy which I had not ventured to expect from her, she had made all her arrangements for leaving home, and had started for Edinburgh to join me as my traveling companion. “You shall not go away alone, George,” she wrote, “while I have strength and spirits to keep you company.”

In three days from the time when I read those words our preparations were completed, and we were on our way to the Continent.