remonstrance would be useless; I could see it in her face; I could hear it in her voice. I turned round to open the drawing-room door.
“You are hard on me, madam,” I said at parting. “I am at your mercy, and I must submit.”
She suddenly looked up, and answered me with a flush on her kind and handsome old face.
“As God is my witness, child, I pity you from the bottom of my heart!”
After that extraordinary outburst of feeling, she took up her work with one hand, and signed to me with the other to leave her.
I bowed to her in silence, and went out.
I had entered the house far from feeling sure of the course I ought to take in the future. I left the house positively resolved, come what might of it, to discover the secret which the mother and son were hiding from me. As to the question of the name, I saw it now in the light in which I ought to have seen it from the first. If Mrs. Macallan had been twice married (as I had rashly chosen to suppose), she would certainly have shown some signs of recognition when she heard me addressed by her first husband’s name. Where all else was mystery, there was no mystery here. Whatever his reasons might be, Eustace had assuredly married me under an assumed name.
Approaching the door of our lodgings, I saw my husband walking backward and forward before it, evidently waiting for my return. If he asked me the question, I decided to tell him frankly where I had been, and what had passed between his mother and myself.
He hurried to meet me with signs of disturbance in his face and manner.
“I have a favor to ask of you, Valeria,” he said. “Do you mind returning with me to London by the next train?”
I looked at him. In the popular phrase, I could hardly believe my own ears.
“It’s a matter of business,” he went on, “of no interest to any one but myself, and it requires my presence in London. You don’t wish to sail just yet, as I understand? I can’t leave you here by yourself. Have you any objection to going to London for a day or two?”
Prev.
Back
Top