“He’s married now,” interrupted Nina, “Charlie’s married, but he came to see me once, down at the old Asylum, and I saw him through the grates, for I was shut up in a tantrum.  He cried, Miggie, just as Arthur does sometimes, and called me poor lost Nina.  He held an angel in his arms with blue eyes like mine, and he said she was his child and Margaret’s!  Her name was Nina, too.  Wasn’t it nice?” And she smiled upon Edith, who involuntarily groaned as she thought how dreadful it must have been for Mr. Hudson to gaze through iron bars upon the wreck of his early love.

“Poor man,” she sighed, turning to Arthur.  “Is he happy with his Margaret!”

“He seems to be,” said Arthur, “People can outlive their first affection, you know.  He resides in New York now, and is to all appearance a prosperous, happy man.  The curse has fallen alone on me, who alone deserve it.”

He spoke bitterly, and for a moment sat apparently thinking; then, resuming his story, said,

“I did not open Mr. Bernard’s letter until we reached the Revere House, and I was alone in my room.  Then I broke the seal and read, while my blood curdled within my veins and every hair pricked at its roots.  The old man knew he was about to die, and confessed to me in part his manifold transgressions, particularly his inhuman treatment of his last wife, the mother of little Miggie, but as this cannot, of course, be interesting to you, I will not repeat it.”

“Oh, do,” exclaimed Edith, feeling somehow that anything concerning the mother of Miggie Bernard would interest her.

“Well, then,” returned Arthur, “he did not tell me all the circumstances of his marriage.  I only know that she was a foreigner and very beautiful—­a governess, too, I think in some German family, and that he married her under an assumed name.”

“An assumed name!” Edith cried.  “Why was that, pray?”

“I hardly know,” returned Arthur, “but believe he became in some way implicated in a fight or gambling brawl in Paris, and being threatened with arrest took another name than his own, and fled to Germany or Switzerland, where he found his wife.  They were married privately, and after two or three years he brought her to his Florida home, where his proud mother and maiden sister affected to despise her because of her poverty.  He was at that time given to drinking, and almost every day became beastly intoxicated, abusing his young wife so shamefully that her life became intolerable, and at last when he was once absent from home for a few weeks, he resolved upon going back to Europe, and leaving him forever.  This plan she confided to a maid servant who had accompanied her from England, a resolute, determined woman, who arranged the whole so skillfully that no one suspected their designs until they were far on their way to New York.  The old mother, who was then living, would not suffer them to be pursued, and more than a week went by ere Mr. Bernard learned what had occurred.  He followed them of course.  He was man enough for that, but falling in with some of his boon companions, almost as soon as he reached the city, he drank so deeply that for several days he was unable to search for them, and in that time both his wife and Miggie died.”