enough for me now. Benjamin had insisted on my considering his
cottage as my home. Under these circumstances, the expenses in which my
determination to clear my husband's character might involve me were
the only expenses for which I had to provide. I could afford to be
independent, and independent I resolved that I would be.

While I am occupied in confessing my weakness and my errors, it is
only right to add that, dearly as I still loved my unhappy, misguided
husband, there was one little fault of his which I found it not easy to
forgive.

Pardoning other things, I could not quite pardon his concealing from me
that he had been married to a first wife. Why I should have felt this
so bitterly as I did, at certain times and seasons, I am not able to
explain. Jealousy was at the bottom of it, I suppose. And yet I was
not conscious of being jealous--especially when I thought of the poor
creature's miserable death. Still, Eustace ought not to have kept _that_
secret from me, I used to think to myself, at odd times when I was
discouraged and out of temper. What would _he_ have said if I had been a
widow, and had never told him of it?

It was getting on toward evening when I returned to the cottage.
Benjamin appeared to have been on the lookout for me. Before I could
ring at the bell he opened the garden gate.

"Prepare yourself for a surprise, my dear," he said. "Your uncle, the
Reverend Doctor Starkweather, has arrived from the North, and is waiting
to see you. He received your letter this morning, and he took the first
train to London as soon as he had read it."

In another minute my uncle's strong arms were round me. In my forlorn
position, I felt the good vicar's kindness, in traveling all the way
to London to see me, very gratefully. It brought the tears into my
eyes--tears, without bitterness, that did me good.

"I have come, my dear child, to take you back to your old home," he
said. "No words can tell how fervently I wish you had never left your
aunt and me. Well! well! we won't talk about it. The mischief is done,
and the next thing is to mend it as well as we can. If I could only get
within arm's-length of that husband of yours, Valeria--There! there! God
forgive me, I am forgetting that I am a clergyman. What shall I forget
next, I wonder? By-the-by, your aunt sends you her dearest love. She is
more superstitious than ever. This miserable business doesn't surprise
her a bit. She says it all began with your ma