“I am sure, dear Valentine, he does not expect anything of the sort,” exclaimed Laura faintly, but with such a glow of pleasure in her face as cheated Valentine for the moment into gladness and cordiality.

“Depend upon it, he will be pleased notwithstanding to find you even a better bargain than he expected.”  Laura took Valentine’s hand when he said this, and laid it against her cheek.  “What’s his name, Laura?”

“His name is Swan.”

Thereupon the whole story came out, told from Laura’s point of view, but with moderate fairness.

Valentine was surprised; but when he had seen the letters and discovered that the usually vacillating Laura had quite made up her mind to sail to New York, he determined that his help and sanction should enable her to do so in the most desirable and respectable fashion.  Besides, how convenient for him, and how speedy a release from all responsibility about her!  Of course he remembered this, and when Laura heard him call her lover “Don Josef,” she thought it a delightful and romantic name.

But Mrs. Peter Melcombe was angry when Laura told her that Joseph had written again, and that Valentine knew all and meant to help her.  She burst into tears.  “Considering all I have suffered,” she said, “in consequence of that young man’s behaviour, I wonder you have not more feeling than to have anything to say to him.  Humanly speaking, he is the cause of all my misfortunes; but for him, I might have been mistress of Melcombe still, and my poor darling, my only delight, might have been well and happy.”

Laura made no reply, but she repeated the conversation afterwards to Valentine with hesitating compunction, and a humble hope that he would put a more favourable construction on her conduct than Amelia had done.

“Humanly speaking,” repeated Valentine with bitterness, “I suppose, then, she wishes to insinuate that God ordained the child’s death, and she had nothing to do with it?”

“She behaved with beautiful submission,” urged Laura.

“I dare say! but the child had been given over to her absolute control, and she actually had a warning sent to her, so that she knew that it was running a risk to take him into heat, and hurry, and to unwholesome food.  She chose to run the risk.  She is a foolish, heartless woman.  If she says anything to me, I shall tell her that I think so.”

“I feel all the more bitter about it,” he muttered to himself, “because I have done the same thing.”

But Mrs. Melcombe said nothing, she contented herself with having made Laura uncomfortable by her tears, and as the days and weeks of her visit at Melcombe went on she naturally cared less about the matter, for she had her own approaching marriage to think of, and on the whole it was not unpleasant to her to be for ever set free from any duty toward her sister-in-law.