“Do not scruple to refuse me,” she said, “if you do not approve.  I hardly venture to hope that you will give your consent.  If you do, I will thank you for it.  If you should think it best to refuse it, I submit humbly as I submit now.  Let me add that I would not ask the favor but that my health and strength are failing fast.”

Lord Arleigh mused long and anxiously over this letter.  He hardly cared that her mother should go to Dower House; it would perhaps be the means of his unhappy secret becoming known.  Nor did he like to refuse Madaline, unhappy, lonely, and ill.  Dear Heaven, if he could but go to her himself and comfort her.

Chapter XXXVI.

Long and anxiously did Lord Arleigh muse over his wife’s letter.  What was he to do?  If her mother was like the generality of her class, then he was quite sure that the secret he had kept would be a secret no longer—­there was no doubt of that.  She would naturally talk, and the servants would prove the truth of the story, and there would be a terrible expose.  Yet, lonely and sorrowful as Madaline declared herself to be, how could he refuse her?  It was an anxious question for him, and one that caused him much serious thought.  Had he known how ill she was he would not have hesitated a moment.

He wrote to Madaline—­how the letter was received and cherished no one but herself knew—­and told her that he would be in England in a day or two, and would then give her a decided answer.  The letter was kind and affectionate; it came to her hungry heart like dew to a thirsty flower.

A sudden idea occurred to Lord Arleigh.  He would go to England and find out all about the unfortunate man Dornham.  Justice had many victims; it was within the bounds of possibility that the man might have been innocent—­might have been unjustly accused.  If such—­and oh, how he hoped it might be!—­should prove to be the case, then Lord Arleigh felt that he could take his wife home.  It was the real degradation of the crime that he dreaded so utterly—­dreaded more than all that could ever be said about it.  He thought to himself more than once that, if by any unexpected means he discovered that Henry Dornham was innocent of the crime attributed to him, he would in that same hour ask Madaline to forgive him, and to be the mistress of his house.  That was the only real solution of the difficulty that ever occurred to him.  If the man were but innocent he—­Lord Arleigh—­would never heed the poverty, the obscurity the humble name—­all that was nothing.  By comparison it seemed so little that he could have smiled at it.  People might say it was a low marriage, but he had his own idea of what was low.  If only the man could be proved innocent of crime, then he might go to his sweet, innocent wife, and clasping her in his arms, take her to his heart.