lady," said the man, standing with his glazed hat in his hand. "So I came off with it at once."
Jane received the letter from him and looked at its address. "Is—is Mr. Carlton pretty well this morning?" she asked, in a low tone.
"Mr. Carlton's not awake yet, my lady. He seemed very well last night."
"Not awake!" involuntarily exclaimed Jane, scarcely believing it within the range of possibility that Mr. Carlton could sleep at all with that dreadful charge upon him.
"Leastways, he wasn't awake when I come out of the lock-up," returned Bowler, somewhat qualifying his words. "We often do find our prisoners sleep late in the morning, my lady; some of them only gets to sleep when they ought to be awaking."
Jane could not resist another question. In spite of her long-rooted and unaccountable dislike to Mr. Carlton, in spite of this dreadful discovery, she pitied him from her heart, as a humane Christian woman must pity such criminals.
"Does he—appear to feel it very much, Bowler?" she asked, in a low tone. "To be overwhelmed by the thought of his position?"
"We didn't notice nothing of that, my lady," was the man's answer—and it may as well be remarked that he had been engaged in a little matter of business with Lady Jane Chesney some three or four months before: the son of a poor woman in whom she was interested having got into trouble concerning certain tempting apples in a garden on the Rise. "He was quite brisk yesterday evening when he come in, my lady: there didn't seem no difference in him at all from ord'nary. Of course it have got to be proved yet whether he did it or not."
Jane sighed, and left him to carry the letter to Laura, telling him she would bring back the answer if there was any. She had hesitated for a moment whether to give it to her at all, lest it might add to her state of excitement. But she felt that she had no right to keep it back. Who, in a case like this, the law excepted, could intercept a communication between a husband and wife?
Laura—it might be that she had heard the policeman in the house, was sitting up in bed in a dressing-gown, with wild dark eyes and a crimson face. Jane would have broken the news to her gently—that there was a letter from Mr. Carlton—and so have prepared her to receive it; but Laura snatched the letter from Jane's hand and tore it open.
"Forgive me, Laura, for the disgrace and wretchedness this trouble will entail upon you. Full of perplexity and doubt as this moment is, it is of you I think, more than of myself. Whatever I may have done wrong in the past, as connected with this matter, I did it for your sake. With the production of the certificate brought forward to-day, it would seem to be useless of me to deny that I married Clarice Beauchamp. But mind! whatever confession I may make to you, I make none to the world; let them fight out the truth for themselves if they can. I never knew her but as Clarice Beauchamp; I never knew that she had claim to a higher position in life than that of a governess. She was always utterly silent to me on the subject of her family and connections, and I assumed that she was an orphan. I admired Miss Beauchamp; I was foolish enough to marry her secretly; and not until I was afterwards introduced to you, did I find out that I had mistaken admiration for love.
"How passionately I grew to love you, I leave you to remember: you have not forgotten it. I was already scheming in my heart the ways and means by which my hasty marriage might be dissolved, when she forced herself down to South Wennock. The news came upon me like a thunderbolt; the same spot contained her and you, and in the dread of discovery, the fear that you might come to know I had already a wife, I went mad. Laura, hear me! it is the honest truth, so far as I have ever since, looking back, believed———that I went mad in my desperation.
"And there's the whole. When my senses came to me—and they came the same night—I awoke from what seemed an impossible dream. All that could be done then was to guard, if I might, the secret, and to put on an armour against the whole human race, a case of steel to stand between myself and the outer world.
"It is you, Laura, who have at length brought discovery upon me. Oh, why could you not have trusted me wholly? Whatever clouds there might have been in our married life, I declare upon my honour that they had passed, and any late suspicions you may have entertained were utterly groundless. Had you come honestly to me and said 'I want to see what you keep in that safe in the drug-room,' I would have given you the key heartily. There was nothing in the safe, so far as I knew, that you and all the world might not have seen; nothing that could work me harm; for this letter, that it seems you found, I had thought burnt long ago. But, having found the letter, why did you not bring it to me and ask an explanation, rather than give it to Lady Jane? surely a husband should stand nearer than a sister! I might not have told you the truth; it is not likely that I should; but I should
