“The fact of one of my people being in such trouble would bring me to Cacouna if I had no other reason for coming.  I shall be with you, therefore, the day after you receive this.  No one, I should think, need, for the present at least, know of any connection whatever between your family affairs and my visit.  My errand is to try what can be done for the unhappy prisoner, and, as an old friend, I shall ask your hospitality during my stay.  Then I will give you what advice and help I can; of my truest and warmest sympathy I know I need give you no assurance.”

To both mother and daughter this note brought comfort, though Lucia had no knowledge whatever of the many thoughts regarding her father which had begun to occupy her mother’s mind.  To her, strange and unnatural as it may seem, he was simply an object of fear and abhorrence.  She hated him as the cause of her mother’s sufferings, of their false and insecure position, and of the self-loathing which possessed her when she thought of their relationship.  The idea of any wifely duty owing to him could never have struck her, for what visions of married life she had, belonged to a world totally unlike that of her parents’ experience, and she regarded what she knew of that as something beyond all reach of ordinary rules or feelings.

Yet much as she would have wondered had she known it, her mother’s thoughts were coming to be hour by hour more occupied with that long unseen and dreaded husband, who had indeed been her tyrant, but who was still bound to her by ties of her own weaving, and who was the father of her child.  A strange mixture of feelings had taken the place of her old fear and disgust; there was still horror, especially of the new guilt which separated him more than ever from her purer world, but there was a deep and yearning pity also.  She felt sure, before Mr. Strafford arrived, that he would tell her she was right; that Christian—­even by the very act which had put him out of the ranks of ordinary men, out of the place, low and degraded as it was, which he had filled among his own people—­had recovered a claim upon her, and that she must not fail to give him in his need what succour might be possible.  She was right, and Lucia heard with dismay that their secret was about to be betrayed to the very person from whom most of all it had hitherto been kept.

Nothing, however, was to be done rashly.  Mr. Strafford arrived late in the evening, and next day he proposed to go to the jail to see Christian, which he knew there would be no difficulty in doing, and to bring back to Mrs. Costello such an account as would enable her to judge how far her interference might or might not be useful.  There was still a chance that it might be useless, and to that hope Lucia clung with a pertinacity which added to her mother’s anxieties.