your house--the drink is not to blame for this last
misfortune. Only the day before it happened I had taken the pledge,
under persuasion of the good rector here, the Reverend Mr. Fennick. It
is he who has brought me to make this confession, and who takes it down
in writing at my bedside. Do you remember how I once hated the very
name of a parson--and when you proposed, in joke, to marry me before
the registrar, how I took it in downright earnest, and kept you to your
word? We poor horse-riders and acrobats only knew clergymen as the worst
enemies we had--always using their influence to keep the people out of
our show, and the bread out of our mouths. If I had met with Mr. Fennick
in my younger days, what a different woman I might have been!

Well, regrets of that kind are useless now. I am truly sorry, Bernard,
for the evil that I have done to you; and I ask your pardon with a
contrite heart.

You will at least allow it in my favor that your drunken wife knew she
was unworthy of you. I refused to accept the allowance that you offered
to me. I respected your name. For seven years from the time of our
separation I returned to my profession under an assumed name and never
troubled you. The one thing I could not do was to forget you. If you
were infatuated by my unlucky beauty, I loved devotedly on my side.
The well-born gentleman who had sacrificed everything for my sake, was
something more than mortal in my estimation; he was--no! I won't shock
the good man who writes this by saying what he was. Besides, what do you
care for my thoughts of you now?

If you had only been content to remain as I left you--or if I had not
found out that you were in love with Miss Eyrecourt, and were likely to
marry her, in the belief that death had released you from me--I should
have lived and died, doing you no other injury than the first great
injury of consenting to be your wife.

But I made the discovery--it doesn't matter how. Our circus was in
Devonshire at the time. My jealous rage maddened me, and I had a wicked
admirer in a man who was old enough to be my father. I let him suppose
that the way to my favor lay through helping my revenge on the woman who
was about to take my place. He found the money to have you watched at
home and abroad; he put the false announcement of my death in the daily
newspapers, to complete your delusion; he baffled the inquiries made
through your lawyers to obtain positive proof of my death. And last, and