it best to refuse it, I
submit humbly as I submit now. Let me add that I would not ask the favor
but that my health and strength are failing fast."

Lord Arleigh mused long and anxiously over this letter. He hardly cared
that her mother should go to Dower House; it would perhaps be the means
of his unhappy secret becoming known. Nor did he like to refuse
Madaline, unhappy, lonely, and ill. Dear Heaven, if he could but go to
her himself and comfort her.

Chapter XXXVI.

Long and anxiously did Lord Arleigh muse over his wife's letter. What
was he to do? If her mother was like the generality of her class, then
he was quite sure that the secret he had kept would be a secret no
longer--there was no doubt of that. She would naturally talk, and the
servants would prove the truth of the story, and there would be a
terrible _expose_. Yet, lonely and sorrowful as Madaline declared
herself to be, how could he refuse her? It was an anxious question for
him, and one that caused him much serious thought. Had he known how ill
she was he would not have hesitated a moment.

He wrote to Madaline--how the letter was received and cherished no one
but herself knew--and told her that he would be in England in a day or
two, and would then give her a decided answer. The letter was kind and
affectionate; it came to her hungry heart like dew to a thirsty flower.

A sudden idea occurred to Lord Arleigh. He would go to England and find
out all about the unfortunate man Dornham. Justice had many victims; it
was within the bounds of possibility that the man might have been
innocent--might have been unjustly accused. If such--and oh, how he
hoped it might be!--should prove to be the case, then Lord Arleigh felt
that he could take his wife home. It was the real degradation of the
crime that he dreaded so utterly--dreaded more than all that could ever
be said about it. He thought to himself more than once that, if by any
unexpected means he discovered that Henry Dornham was innocent of the
crime attributed to him, he would in that same hour ask Madaline to
forgive him, and to be the mistress of his house. That was the only real
solution of the difficulty that ever occurred to him. If the man were
but innocent he--Lord Arleigh--would never heed the poverty, the
obscurity the humble name--all that was nothing. By comparison it seemed
so little that he could have smiled at it. People might say it was a low
marriage, but he had his own idea