“I have but just returned from abroad,” he wrote, “where I have been for more than two years, and I am completely overwhelmed by the intelligence that awaited me.  You are married, Marion!  You, who promised so faithfully to be my wife.  You, whose letters to me contain that promise given over and over again.  It is too late to ask what this treachery means.  I have by me the letter you wrote, asking for your freedom, and I have the copy of mine absolutely refusing it.  I told you then that I should hold you to your promise, and you have disregarded my words.

“Marion, I must have compensation.  It is useless talking to one like you of love.  You throw aside the poor artist for the rich lord.  You must pay me in your own coin, in what you value most—­money.  You have wronged me as your promised husband.  I had some right to your fortune, as your duped and deserted lover.  That right still remains.  I claim some portion of what ought to have been all mine.

“I am in immediate and urgent want of a thousand pounds.  That is very little for one who ought, as your husband, to be at this moment the master of Hanton Hall and its rich domain.  However, for a time, that will content me; when I want another I will come to you for it.  I will not call at your house; you can send me a check, bank note, or what you will.

“I do not wish to seem harsh, but it is better to tell you at once that if you refuse any money request of mine at any time I shall immediately commence proceedings against you.  I shall bring an action for breach of promise of marriage, and all England will cry shame on the false, mercenary woman who abandoned a poor lover, to whom her troth was plighted, in order to marry a rich lord.  All England shall despise you.  For your child’s sake, I counsel you to avoid an exposure.”

She read those terrible words over and over again.  Suddenly the whole plot grew clear to her.  It was for this they had schemed and plotted.  Not for love of her, but to make money out of her, to trade upon her weakness and folly, stain her character, her fair name, her happiness, the love of her husband and child, the esteem of her friends.  All lay in their hands.  They could, if they would, make her name, that noble name which her husband bore so proudly, a subject of jest all over the world.

She could fancy the papers, their paragraphs, their remarks, their comments.  She could almost see the heading: 

“Action for Breach of Promise against Lady Atherton.”  How the Radicals, who hated her husband for his politics, would rejoice!  Even in the years to come, when her child grew to man’s estate, it would be as a black mark against him that his mother had been the subject of such vulgar jest.  Her husband would never bear it.  He would leave her, she was sure.  Ah! better pay a thousand pounds over and over again than go through all this.

Yet it seemed a large sum; not that she cared for it, but how could she get it without her husband’s knowledge?  By her own wish, all money affairs had been left in his hands; he would wonder when he looked at her check book why she had drawn so large a sum; better write out checks of a hundred pounds each.