that before I said it, for there's
nothin' I wouldn't do for ye, and ye know that, too. Listen! That's John
drivin' in, and I'm going out to meet him."

Chapter XVII

To the fears already possessing Lady Barbara a new one had now been
added, freezing her blood and leaving her prostrate and helpless, like a
plant stricken by an icy blast.

There had been no sleep for her after Martha's revelations regarding
the presence of Felix in town, and turn as she would on her pillow, she
could not escape the dread of one hideous possibility--her meeting him
face to face, uncovering to his penetrating gaze her shame.

That he had had any other purpose in pursuing her across the sea than to
humiliate and punish her, she did not believe. No man, certainly no
man as proud as her husband, would forgive a woman who had trailed his
ancestral name in the mud, and made his family life a byword in clubs
and drawing-rooms. That Martha believed he could still love her was
natural. Such good souls, women of the people, who had always led
restrained and wholesome lives, would believe nothing else, but not a
woman of her own class. She had only to recall a dozen instances where
the bonds of marriage had been broken, with all the attendant scandal
and misery, to be convinced of what would befall her were she and Felix
to meet.

Her one hope was that her husband, baffled in his search, had left the
city, and that neither Martha nor Stephen would ever see him again.
Their inability to find him of late might mean that he had given up the
search, having found no trace of her during all the months in which
he had been trying to find her. Or it might mean that he, too, had
succumbed to the same poverty which she had endured and, being no longer
able to maintain himself in the great city, had sought work elsewhere.

As the thought of this last possibility suddenly took possession of her,
her heart gave a great bound of relief, and in the quiet that ensued,
a certain tenderness for the man whom she had wronged began to well up
within her. She recalled their early life and his unfailing generosity.
Never in all the years she had known him had he refused her the
slightest thing which could, in any way, add to her happiness. Indeed,
he had often denied himself many of the luxuries to which a man of his
tastes and training was entitled, in order to add to her store. Nor had
he ever restrained her in her whims or her extravagance, and never,