(Is the bluntness of moral feeling which could ask such a question as that, after what had just happened, to be pitied or condemned?  I like to lean towards mercy.  Let us pity it.)

The drops had produced their effect.  My poor aunt’s complexion was like itself again.  “No, no, my dear,” she said.  “Go with our friends, and enjoy yourself.”

Her daughter stooped, and kissed her.  I had left the window, and was near the door, when Rachel approached it to go out.  Another change had come over her—­she was in tears.  I looked with interest at the momentary softening of that obdurate heart.  I felt inclined to say a few earnest words.  Alas! my well-meant sympathy only gave offence.  “What do you mean by pitying me?” she asked in a bitter whisper, as she passed to the door.  “Don’t you see how happy I am?  I’m going to the flower-show, Clack; and I’ve got the prettiest bonnet in London.”  She completed the hollow mockery of that address by blowing me a kiss—­and so left the room.

I wish I could describe in words the compassion I felt for this miserable and misguided girl.  But I am almost as poorly provided with words as with money.  Permit me to say—­my heart bled for her.

Returning to my aunt’s chair, I observed dear Mr. Godfrey searching for something softly, here and there, in different parts of the room.  Before I could offer to assist him he had found what he wanted.  He came back to my aunt and me, with his declaration of innocence in one hand, and with a box of matches in the other.

“Dear aunt, a little conspiracy!” he said.  “Dear Miss Clack, a pious fraud which even your high moral rectitude will excuse!  Will you leave Rachel to suppose that I accept the generous self-sacrifice which has signed this paper?  And will you kindly bear witness that I destroy it in your presence, before I leave the house?” He kindled a match, and, lighting the paper, laid it to burn in a plate on the table.  “Any trifling inconvenience that I may suffer is as nothing,” he remarked, “compared with the importance of preserving that pure name from the contaminating contact of the world.  There!  We have reduced it to a little harmless heap of ashes; and our dear impulsive Rachel will never know what we have done!  How do you feel?  My precious friends, how do you feel?  For my poor part, I am as light-hearted as a boy!”

He beamed on us with his beautiful smile; he held out a hand to my aunt, and a hand to me.  I was too deeply affected by his noble conduct to speak.  I closed my eyes; I put his hand, in a kind of spiritual self-forgetfulness, to my lips.  He murmured a soft remonstrance.  Oh the ecstasy, the pure, unearthly ecstasy of that moment!  I sat—­I hardly know on what—­quite lost in my own exalted feelings.  When I opened my eyes again, it was like descending from heaven to earth.  There was nobody but my aunt in the room.  He had gone.

I should like to stop here—­I should like to close my narrative with the record of Mr. Godfrey’s noble conduct.  Unhappily there is more, much more, which the unrelenting pecuniary pressure of Mr. Blake’s cheque obliges me to tell.  The painful disclosures which were to reveal themselves in my presence, during that Tuesday’s visit to Montagu Square, were not at an end yet.