The poor young thing wished him to understand that she had never been untrue to him in heart, as indeed was but too plain, and she had only withdrawn her helpless passive resistance to the marriage with Mr. van Hunker when Berenger’s death had (perhaps willfully) been reported to her as that of Eustace de Ribaumont.  She had not known him to be alive till she had seen him the day before.  Deaths in her own family had made her an heiress sufficiently well endowed to excite Van Hunker’s cupidity, but he had never affected much tenderness for her.  He was greatly her elder, she was his second wife, and he had grown-up daughters who made no secret of their dislike and scorn.  Her timid drooping ways and her Majesty sympathies offended her husband, shown up before him as they were by his daughters, and, in short, her life had been utterly miserable.  Probably, as Annora said, she had been wanting in spirit to rise to her situation, but of course that was not as my brother saw it.  He only beheld what he would have cherished torn from him only to be crushed and flung aside at his very feet, yet so that honour and duty forbade him to do anything for her.

What he said, or what comfort he gave her, I do not fully know, for when he confided to me what grief it was that lay so heavily on his heart and spirits, he dwelt more on her sad situation than on anything else.  The belief in her weakness and inconstancy had evoked in him a spirit of defiance and resistance; but when she was proved guiltless and unhappy, the burden, though less bitter, was far heavier.  I only gathered that he, as the only like-minded adviser she had seen for so long, had felt it his duty to force himself to seem almost hard, cold, and pitiless in the counsel he gave her.

I remember his very words as he writhed himself with the pain of remembrance:  ’And then, Meg, I had to treat the poor child as if I were stone of adamant, and chide her when my very heart was breaking for her.  One moment’s softening, and where should we have been?  And now I have added to her troubles that fancy that I was obdurate in my anger and implacability.’  I assured him that she would honour and thank him in her heart for not having been weak, and he began to repent of what he had left to be inferred, and to assure me of his having neither said nor done anything that could be censured, with vehement laudation of her sweetness and modesty.

The interview had been broken up by the sight of the return from Church.  Mrs. Van Hunker had had full time to retire to her room and Eustace to arrange himself, so that no one guessed at the visitor he had had.  She came down to supper, and a few words and civilities had passed between them, but he had never either seen or heard of her since.

Harry Merrycourt, who had known of the early passages between them, had never guessed that there was more than the encounter in the hall to cause the melancholy which he kindly watched and bore with in my brother, who was seriously ill again after he reached their lodgings in London, and indeed I thought at the time when he was with me in Paris, that his decay of health chiefly proceeded from sorrow of heart.