Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 2).djvu/453

 "If you will look at this," she said, "you won't say the same."

He took the paper and began to read casually; then he became interested. He read to the end without speaking; when he had finished he rang the bell and gave the manuscript to the young man who answered his summons. "This can go to press at once," he said; "you have had the necessary directions already."

Eleanor half rose to her feet, and then sat down again. She did not utter a word.

"You have never done anything so good," said the editor; "it is an unpleasant subject, but you have treated it cleverly, very cleverly."

"I shall never do anything so good again," was her strange answer. "I knew you would take it. Would you mind paying me for it now? For I must go into the country tomorrow."

He gave her the cheque she asked for, and she took Lorna away next day.

A month after she saw Ralph Webster again. He had returned unexpectedly, and he sought her out at Southsea, where she was living with her baby. But they did not meet as friends; she saw him with a shock of surprise, and he looked at her as she had never seen him look before.

"Mrs. Wakefield," he said, "I have no right to follow you here, but I came to ask you a single question."

She understood the situation at once, and was ready. "I will answer any question that you like to ask," she said.

He had a magazine in his fingers, and he opened it at a page that she well knew. Were not the title letters of it, the whole aspect of it, burnt into her brain? They were part of the crime that she felt she had committed.

"There is a story here," he said, "that occupies a very prominent place. It is called 'Hand in Hand to Death.' I think that you wrote it."

"Yes," said Eleanor, in a low voice; "I wrote it."

"There is no one in the world, except you and myself, that knows the whole of that story. I told it to you because I intended, the next time I saw you, to ask you to be my wife. I wanted you to have time to think of it first. You might not have liked me so well after knowing it."

She folded her child closer in her arms, and bent over it, that he might not see her face.

"I need not speak to you of such a subject now. I know how much you value my esteem my confidence. You have sold my trouble to the world. I suppose you sold it?"

"Yes," said Eleanor, in a still, strange voice; "I was paid eight pounds for it." She was remembering that she had changed the first sovereign to purchase her railway ticket, and that she had calculated how many weeks it would keep her in the country.

"I knew that a woman I loved might despise me," said Ralph; "but I could not guess that a woman I trusted would betray me—for money."

She did not answer him anything. There was that in his tone which made her not care to defend herself. She had injured him in a deadly and cruel manner. Let him say to her what he would. But he said no more; he lifted his hat and went.

A year after that found Ralph Webster a successful man. He had written a novel that hit the public taste; it was full of bitterness and scoffing; but the public liked such bitterness and scoffing, and bought the book.