“I read them—­I was obliged to read them—­but I did so privately, and I put them in my pocket before the dean saw them.  No one ever cast eyes upon them except myself.  I took them home with me and kept them, And I keep them now, for they first taught me what she was—­this chosen wife of mine.  They let me into the secret of that simple, gentle. innocent, girlish heart; they made me feel the worth of it, even though it was being thrown away on a worthless man.  And I suspect, from that time I wanted it for my own.”

He went on to say how he had first made acquaintance with her—­on business grounds partly, connected with her father’s sudden death, but also intending, as soon as he felt himself warranted in taking such a liberty, to return these letters, and tell her in a plain, honest, fatherly manner what a risk she had run, and what a merciful escape she had made from this young man, who, Dr. Grey then felt certain, would never again dare to appear at Avonsbridge.

But the opportunity never came.  The “fatherly” feeling was swallowed up in another, which effectually sealed the good man’s tongue.  He determined to make her his wife, and then the letters, the whole story, in which he had read her heart as clear as a book, and was afraid of nothing, concerned himself alone.  He felt at liberty to tell her how or when he chose.  At least so he persuaded himself.

“But perhaps I, too, was a little bit of a coward, my child.  I, too, might have avoided much misery if I had had the strength to speak out.  But we all make mistakes sometimes, as I told you once.  The great thing is not to leave them as mistakes, not to sink under them, but to recognize them for what they are, and try to remedy them if possible.  Even if we married too hastily—­I, because it was the only way in which I could shelter and protect my darling, and you—­well, perhaps because I over-persuaded you, still, we are happy now.”

Happy?  It was a word too small—­any word would be.  The only expression for such happiness was silence.

“And what are we to do about him?”

“Him! who?”

Christian said it quite naturally for, woman-like, in that rapture of content, the whole world dwindled down into but two beings, herself and her husband.

Dr. Grey smiled—­not dissatisfied.  “I meant Sir Edwin Uniacke.  May I read his letter?”

“Certainly.”

She turned her face away, blushing in bitter shame.  But there was no need.  Either “the de’il is not so black as he’s painted,” or, what was more probable, that personage himself, incarnate in man’s evil nature, shrinks from intruding his worst blackness upon the white purity of a good woman.  Probably never was an illicit or disgraceful love-letter written to any woman for which she herself was quite blameless.

Dr. Grey perused very composedly Sir Edwin’s epistle to his wife, saying at the end of it, “Shall I read this aloud?  There is no reason why I should not.”