"I do believe it for a reason that I shall give
you presently. But first I want to go though our joint history, very
briefly, just to justify myself if you like. Five-and-twenty years
ago, or was it six-and-twenty, I was a boy of eighteen and you were a
woman of twenty, a housemaid in my mother's house, and you made love
to me. Then my mother was called away to nurse my brother who died at
school at Portsmouth, and I fell sick with scarlet fever and you
nursed me through it--it would have been kinder if you had poisoned
me, and in my weak state you got a great hold over my mind, and I
became attached to you, for you were handsome in those days. Then you
dared me to marry you, and partly out of bravado, partly from
affection, I took out a licence, to do which I made a false
declaration that I was over age, and gave false names of the parishes
in which we resided. Next day, half tipsy and not knowing what I did,
I went through the form of marriage with you, and a few days
afterwards my mother returned, observed that we were intimate, and
dismissed you. You went without a word as to our marriage, which we
both looked on a farce, and for years I lost sight of you. Fifteen
years afterwards, when I had almost forgotten this adventure of my
youth, I became acquainted with a young lady with whom I fell in love,
and whose fortune, though not large, was enough to help me
considerably in my profession as a country lawyer, in which I was
doing well. I thought that you were dead, or that if you lived, the
fact of my having made the false declaration of age and locality would
be enough to invalidate the marriage, as would certainly have been the
case if I had also made a false declaration of names; and my impulses
and interests prompting me to take the risk, I married that lady. Then
it was that you hunted me down, and then for the first time I did what
I ought to have done before, and took the best legal opinions as to
the validity of the former marriage, which, to my horror, I found was
undoubtedly a binding one. You also took opinions and came to the same
conclusion. Since then the history has been a simple one. Out of my
wife's fortune of ten thousand pounds, I paid you no less than seven
thousand as hush money, on your undertaking to leave this country for
America, and never return here again. I should have done better to
face it out, but I feared to lose my position and practice. You left
and wrote to me that you too had married