So September came, with its glory of autumn leaves.  Just three years had elapsed since Lady Charlewood had died; and then the great trouble of her life came to Margaret Dornham.

Chapter V.

On the day after Dr. Letsom’s death, Margaret Dornham’s husband was apprehended on a charge of poaching and aiding in a dangerous assault on Lord Turton’s gamekeepers.  Bail was refused for him, but at the trial he was acquitted for want of evidence.  Every one knew he was guilty.  He made no great effort to conceal it.  But he defied the whole legal power of England to prove him guilty.  He employed clever counsel, and the result was his acquittal.  He was free; but the prison brand was on him, and his wife felt that she could not endure the disgrace.

“I shall go from bad to worse now, Maggie,” he said to her.  “I do not find prison so bad, nor yet difficult to bear; if ever I Bee by any lucky hit I can make myself a rich man, I shall not mind a few years in jail as the price.  A forgery, or something of that kind, or the robbery of a well-stocked bank, will be henceforward my highest aim in life.”

She placed her hand on his lips and prayed him for Heaven’s sake to be silent.  He only laughed.

“Nature never intended me to work—­she did not indeed, Maggie.  My fellow-men must keep me; they keep others far less deserving.”

From that moment she knew no peace or rest.  He would keep his word; he would look upon crime as a source of profit; he would watch his opportunity of wrong-doing, and seize it When it came.

In the anguish of her heart she cried aloud that it must not be at Ash wood; anywhere else, in any other spot, but not there, where she had been known in the pride of her fair young life—­not there, where people had warned her not to marry the handsome reckless, ne’er-do-well, and had prophesied such terrible evil for her if she did marry him—­not there, where earth was so fair, where all nature told of innocence and purity.  If he must sin, let it be far away in large cities where the ways of men were evil.

She decided on leaving Ashwood.  Another and perhaps even stronger motive that influenced her was her passionate love for the child; that was her one hope in life, her one sheet-anchor, the one thing that preserved her from the utter madness of desolation.

The three years had almost elapsed; the doctor was dead, and had left nothing behind him that could give any clew to Madaline’s identity, and in a short time—­she trembled to think how short—­the father would come to claim his child, and she would lose her.  When she thought of that, Margaret Dornham clung to the little one in a passion of despair.  She would go away and take Madaline with her—­keep her where she could love her—­where she could bring her up as her own child, and lavish all the warmth and devotion of her nature upon her.  She never once thought that in acting thus she was doing a selfish, a cruel deed—­that she was taking the child from her father, who of all people living had the greatest claim upon her.