s some time getting the ink the right colour (mixing it over and
over again in pots and bottles of mine), and some time afterwards in
practising the handwriting. But he succeeded in the end, and made an
honest woman of his mother after she was dead in her grave! So far, I
don't deny that he behaved honourably enough to myself. He gave me my
watch and chain, and spared no expense in buying them; both were of
superior workmanship, and very expensive. I have got them still--the
watch goes beautifully.

You said the other day that Mrs. Clements had told you everything she
knew. In that case there is no need for me to write about the trumpery
scandal by which I was the sufferer--the innocent sufferer, I
positively assert. You must know as well as I do what the notion was
which my husband took into his head when he found me and my
fine-gentleman acquaintance meeting each other privately and talking
secrets together. But what you don't know is how it ended between that
same gentleman and myself. You shall read and see how he behaved to me.

The first words I said to him, when I saw the turn things had taken,
were, "Do me justice--clear my character of a stain on it which you
know I don't deserve. I don't want you to make a clean breast of it to
my husband--only tell him, on your word of honour as a gentleman, that
he is wrong, and that I am not to blame in the way he thinks I am. Do
me that justice, at least, after all I have done for you." He flatly
refused, in so many words. He told me plainly that it was his interest
to let my husband and all my neighbours believe the falsehood--because,
as long as they did so they were quite certain never to suspect the
truth. I had a spirit of my own, and I told him they should know the
truth from my lips. His reply was short, and to the point. If I
spoke, I was a lost woman, as certainly as he was a lost man.

Yes! it had come to that. He had deceived me about the risk I ran in
helping him. He had practised on my ignorance, he had tempted me with
his gifts, he had interested me with his story--and the result of it
was that he made me his accomplice. He owned this coolly, and he ended
by telling me, for the first time, what the frightful punishment really
was for his offence, and for any one who helped him to commit it. In
those days the law was not so tender-hearted as I hear it is now.
Murderers were not the only people liable to be hanged, and women
convicts were not