“Cousin Mary,” said Nessy, in the same impassive tone, “you were always self-willed, selfish, and most insulting as a child, and I am sorry to see that neither marriage nor education at a convent has chastened your ungovernable temper.  But I have told you that I do not choose that you shall injure your father’s health by disturbing his plans, and you shall certainly not do so.”

“Then take care,” I answered, “that in protecting my father’s health you do not destroy it altogether.”

In spite of her cold and savourless nature, she understood my meaning, for after a moment of silence she said: 

“Cousin Mary, you may do exactly as you please.  Your conduct in the future, whatever it may be, will be no affair of mine, and I shall not consider that I am in any way responsible for it.”

At last I began to receive anonymous letters.  They came from various parts of Ellan and appeared to be in different handwritings.  Some of them advised me to fly from the island, and others enclosed a list of steamers’ sailings.

Only a woman who has been the victim of this species of cowardly torture can have any idea of the shame of it, and again and again I asked myself if I ought not to escape from my husband’s house before he returned.

But Price seemed to find a secret joy in the anonymous letters, saying she believed she knew the source of them:  and one evening towards the end, she came running into my room with a shawl over her head, a look of triumph in her face, and an unopened letter in her hand.

“There!” she said.  “It’s all up with Madame now.  You’ve got the game in your own hands, my lady, and can send them all packing.”

The letter was addressed to my husband in London.  Price had seized the arm of Alma’s maid in the act of posting it, and under threat of the law (not to speak of instant personal chastisement) the girl had confessed that both this letter and others had been written by our housekeeper under the inspiration of her mistress.

Without any compunction Price broke the seal of the intercepted letter and read it aloud to me.  It was a shocking thing, accusing me with Martin, and taunting my husband with the falseness of the forthcoming entertainment.

Feeling too degraded to speak, I took the letter in silence out of my maid’s hands, and while I was in the act of locking it away in a drawer Alma came up with a telegram from my husband, saying he was leaving London by the early train the following morning and would arrive at Blackwater at half-past three in the afternoon.

“Dear old Jimmy!” she said, “what a surprise you have in store for him!  But of course you’ve told him already, haven’t you? . . .  No?  Ah, I see, you’ve been saving it all up to tell him face to face.  Oh, happy, happy you!”

It was too late to leave now.  The hour of my trial had come.  There was no possibility of escape.  It was just as if Satan had been holding me in the net of my sin, so that I could not fly away.