“Look, you are tearing into my name, which he wrote,” Daisy said, and then remembering herself, she sank back into her seat in the garden chair, while Pauline wondered what harm there was in tearing an old soiled wrapper, and why her governess should take it so carefully in her hand and roll it up as if it had been a living thing.

There were notices of new books, and a runaway match in high life, and a suicide on Summer Street, and a golden wedding in Roxbury, and the latest fashions from Paris, into which Pauline plunged with avidity while Daisy listened like one in a dream, asking when the fashions were exhausted:  “Is that all?  Are there no deaths or marriages?”

Pauline had not thought of that—­she would see, and she hunted through the columns till she found Guy’s pencil mark, and read: 

“Married, this morning, at St. Paul’s Church, by the Rev. Dr. ——­, assisted by the rector, Guy Thornton, Esq., of Cuylerville, to Miss Julia Hamilton, of this city.”

“Yes, yes; it’s very hot here, isn’t it?  I think I will go in,” Daisy said, her fingers working nervously with the bit of paper she held.

But Pauline was too intent on the name of Thornton to hear what Daisy said, and she asked:  “Is Mr. Thornton your friend?”

It was a natural enough question, and Daisy roused herself to answer it, and said quickly:  “He is the son of my husband’s father.”

“Oh, oui,” Pauline rejoined, a little mystified as to the exact relationship existing between Guy Thornton and her teacher’s husband, whom she supposed was dead, as Daisy had only confided to madame the fact of a divorce.

“What date is the paper?” Daisy asked, and on being told she said softly to herself:  “I see, it was too late.”

There was in her mind no doubt as to what the result would have been had her letter been in time; no doubt of Guy’s preference for her; no regret that she had written to him, except that the knowledge that she loved him at last might make him wretched with thinking “what might have been,” and with the bitter pain which cut her heart like a knife there was mingled a pity for Guy, who would perhaps suffer more than she did, if that were possible.  She never once thought of retribution, or of murmuring against her fate, but accepted it meekly, albeit she staggered under the load and grew faint as she thought of the lonely life before her, and she so young.

Slowly she went back to her room, while Pauline walked up and down the garden trying to make out the relationship between the newly married Thornton and her teacher.

“The son of her husband’s father?” she repeated, until at last a meaning dawned upon her, and she said:  “Then he must be her brother-in-law; but why didn’t she say so?  Maybe, though, that is the English way of putting it,” and, having thus settled the matter, Pauline joined her mother, who was asking for Mrs. Thornton.

“Gone to her room, and her brother-in-law is married.  It was marked in a paper and I read it to her, and she’s sick,” Pauline said, without, however, in the least connecting the sickness with the marriage.