declining
to accede to the request that I have just addressed to you, I beg to
say that I shall consider it my duty to my daughter to have this very
unpleasant matter cleared up. If I don't hear from you to my full
satisfaction by return of post, I shall be obliged to tell my husband
that circumstances have happened which justify us in immediately testing
the respectability of Miss Gwilt's reference. And when he asks me for my
authority, I will refer him to you.
"Your obedient servant, ANNE MILROY."
In those terms the major's wife threw off the mask, and left her victim
to survey at his leisure the trap in which she had caught him. Allan's
belief in Mrs. Milroy's good faith had been so implicitly sincere
that her letter simply bewildered him. He saw vaguely that he had been
deceived in some way, and that Mrs. Milroy's neighborly interest in
him was not what it had looked on the surface; and he saw no more. The
threat of appealing to the major--on which, with a woman's ignorance of
the natures of men, Mrs. Milroy had relied for producing its
effect--was the only part of the letter to which Allan reverted with any
satisfaction: it relieved instead of alarming him. "If there _is_ to be
a quarrel," he thought, "it will be a comfort, at any rate, to have it
out with a man."
Firm in his resolution to shield the unhappy woman whose secret he
wrongly believed himself to have surprised, Allan sat down to write
his apologies to the major's wife. After setting up three polite
declarations, in close marching order, he retired from the field. "He
was extremely sorry to have offended Mrs. Milroy. He was innocent of all
intention to offend Mrs. Milroy. And he begged to remain Mrs. Milroy's
truly." Never had Allan's habitual brevity as a letter-writer done him
better service than it did him now. With a little more skillfulness in
the use of his pen, he might have given his enemy even a stronger hold
on him than the hold she had got already.
The interval day passed, and with the next morning's post Mrs. Milroy's
threat came realized in the shape of a letter from her husband. The
major wrote less formally than his wife had written, but his questions
were mercilessly to the point:
["Private."]
"The Cottage, Thorpe Ambrose, Friday, July 11, 1851.
"DEAR SIR--When you did me the favor of calling here a few days since,
you asked a question relating to my governess, Miss Gwilt, which I
thought rather a strange one at the ti
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