“How often have I heard you express your detestation of that fellow!” the young man wrote indignantly.  “How often have I heard you declare that no earthly persuasion should ever induce you to marry him!  And yet before my back has been turned six months, I hear that you are his wife.  Without a word of warning, without a line of explanation to soften the blow—­if anything could soften it—­the news comes to me, from a stranger who knew nothing of my love for you.  It is very hard, Ellen; all the harder because I had so fully trusted in your fidelity.”

“I will own that the prospect I had to offer you was a poor one; involving long delay before I could give you such a home as I wanted to give you; but O, Nelly, Nelly, I felt so sure that you would be true to me!  And if you found yourself in any difficulty, worried beyond your power of resistance by your father—­though I did not think you were the kind of girl to yield weakly to persuasion—­a line from you would have brought me to your side, ready to defend you from any persecution, and only too proud to claim you for my wife, and carry you away from your father’s unkindness.”

The letter went on for some time in the same upbraiding strain.  Ellen shed many bitter tears over it in the quiet of her own room.  It had been delivered to her secretly by her old friend Sarah Peters, the miller’s daughter, who had been the confidante of her love affairs; for even in his indignation Mr. Randall had been prudent enough to consider that such a missive, falling perchance into Stephen Whitelaw’s hands, might work serious mischief.

Cruel as the letter was, Ellen could not leave it quite unanswered; some word in her own defence she must needs write; but her reply was of the briefest.

“There are some things that can never be explained,” she wrote, “and my marriage is one of those.  No one could save me from it, you least of all.  There was no help for me; and I believe, with all my heart, that, in acting as I did, I only did my duty.  I had not the courage to write to you beforehand to tell you what was going to be.  I thought it was almost better you should hear it from a stranger.  The more hardly you think of me, the easier it will be for you to forget me.  There is some comfort in that.  I daresay it will be very easy for you to forget.  But if, in days to come, when you are happily married to some one else, you can teach yourself to think more kindly of me, and to believe that in what I did I acted for the best, you will be performing an act of charity towards a poor unhappy girl, who has very little left to hope for in this world.”

It was a hard thing for Ellen to think that, in the estimation of the man she loved, she must for ever seem the basest and most mercenary of womankind; and yet how poor an excuse could she offer in the vague pleading of her letter!  She could not so much as hint at the truth; she could not blacken her father’s character.  That Frank Randall should despise her, only made her trial a little sharper, her daily burden a little heavier, she told herself.