In which a Strange Thing Happens.

“If your love has ended in tragedy, as mine has done, then we can surely sympathise with each other, Miss Miller,” I said, looking into her tearful eyes. “You know well how I have suffered. I believed that Ella really preferred that man to myself, and what you have now told me amazes me. I believed that she was false to me—and yet you tell me that she was true. Ah! how dearly I loved her! I do not believe that any man ever loved a woman so fondly, and with such fierce passion as I did. I was hers—body and soul. My love for her was that deep, all-consuming affection which sometimes makes a man as wax in a woman’s hands—to be moulded for good or for evil as she wills it. I lost all count of time, of friends, of everything, for I lived only for her. The hours when we were parted were to me like years, her words were music, her smiles the sunlight of my life, her sighs the shadows, her kisses the ecstatic bliss of terrestrial paradise in which I lived. Ah! yes, you who have loved and lost can well understand all that her love meant to me—you can understand why one dark foggy night I stood upon Charing Cross platform and swore an oath that never again would I put foot in the country which, though my native land, held for me only a poignant memory.”

“Yes,” she answered, with a slight sigh, “I quite understand how you must have suffered. Yet how strange it is that you should actually have been Ella’s lover—the man who she declared to me was the only one she would ever love. I did not know you, of course, yet I sympathised with you when she told me that she was going that evening to meet you, and to lie to you under compulsion.”

“But why—why did she consent to do this?” I asked.

“She confessed to me the reason. She spoke in confidence, but now that it is all past, I may surely tell you. The fact was that her father, owing to the great depreciation in the value of land, had got into the hands of the Jews, and was on the verge of bankruptcy. Blumenthal, who had lent him a large sum upon mortgage, had offered to return the deeds on the day that he married Ella.”

“Then she actually sacrificed herself to save her father!” I cried.

“Without a doubt. And what a sacrifice! She loved you, Mr Leaf, and yet she dismissed you in order to save her father from ruin.”

“Blumenthal was a brute to have ever suggested such a condition,” I declared savagely. “I never saw him. What kind of man was he? Did you meet him?”

“Yes. He was at Porchester Terrace on the afternoon when I called,” she replied. “A short, stout, black-whiskered man, of a decidedly Hebrew cast. He was dressed loudly and wore a white waistcoat with heavy gold albert—a typical City man such as one sees in Cornhill or Lothbury.”

“She showed no sign of affection towards him?”

“None whatever. He was introduced to me by Mr Murray as Ella’s affianced husband, and I was, of course, amazed that she should entertain a spark of affection for him. But half an hour later, when we were alone, she confessed in tears everything to me, just as I have related it to you.”

“Well, you utterly astound me,” was all I could exclaim.

What she had revealed to me placed my little Ella in an entirely new light. I never dreamed of her self-martyrdom. I sighed heavily, and a big lump arose in my throat as I reflected that, perhaps, after all death was preferable to life with a man whom she could not love.

The calm twilight was deepening into night, and the silence was broken only by the low murmuring of the water, the swift swish of some rat or water-hen in the rushes startled at our presence, and the dismal cry of a night-bird in the willows on the opposite bank.

“Did you hear nothing more of Ella after that day at Porchester Terrace—that 12th of November that was, alas! fatal to my happiness?”

“She wrote to me twice. One letter I received in Rome a month afterwards, and the second followed me about some weeks, and at last found me at Lindau, on the Lake of Constance. Both letters were full of her own unhappiness. In the first she reproached herself bitterly for having lied to the man she really loved—though she never mentioned your name—and said that she was back at Wichenford, but for her the world was dead. The man whom she had dismissed had left her in disgust and despair and had gone abroad, whither she knew not. A friend of yours had, it seemed, told her that you had gone to Algeria, and her letter concluded with the words: ‘I am alone to blame for this, yet how could I, in the circumstances, have acted otherwise?’”

“And the second letter?” I asked eagerly.

“It was written a month later, from Blumenthal’s shooting-box near Blair Athol. She and her father were guests there at the great house-party consisting mostly of wealthy City men and their wives. She described it and said how she hated it all. She had, she told me, tried to escape. She had even thought of writing to you to tell you the truth and ask your counsel, yet what use was it when she knew that she must save her father from the ruin that threatened. Wichenford Place had been the home of the Murrays ever since the days of James the First, when the King himself, granted it to his faithful partisan, Donald Murray of Parton, in Dumfriesshire. No Murray had ever before mortgaged it, therefore it was clearly her duty to her family to redeem it from the hands of usurers and vandals, even at cost of her own happiness.”

“A noble sacrifice!” I sighed.

“Yes, Mr Leaf. She was a noble girl,” declared my handsome companion. “I, who knew her through ten years or so, knew her, perhaps, better than even you yourself did. The Little Madonna was never accused of an unkind or unjust action.”

“And after that letter?”

“A few months later she came to visit us at Enghien. She and her father were in Paris, where she was buying her trousseau. But she made no mention of Blumenthal. Afterwards we............