He was some time getting the ink the right colour (mixing it over and over again in pots and bottles of mine), and some time afterwards in practising the handwriting.  But he succeeded in the end, and made an honest woman of his mother after she was dead in her grave!  So far, I don’t deny that he behaved honourably enough to myself.  He gave me my watch and chain, and spared no expense in buying them; both were of superior workmanship, and very expensive.  I have got them still—­the watch goes beautifully.

You said the other day that Mrs. Clements had told you everything she knew.  In that case there is no need for me to write about the trumpery scandal by which I was the sufferer—­the innocent sufferer, I positively assert.  You must know as well as I do what the notion was which my husband took into his head when he found me and my fine-gentleman acquaintance meeting each other privately and talking secrets together.  But what you don’t know is how it ended between that same gentleman and myself.  You shall read and see how he behaved to me.

The first words I said to him, when I saw the turn things had taken, were, “Do me justice—­clear my character of a stain on it which you know I don’t deserve.  I don’t want you to make a clean breast of it to my husband—­only tell him, on your word of honour as a gentleman, that he is wrong, and that I am not to blame in the way he thinks I am.  Do me that justice, at least, after all I have done for you.”  He flatly refused, in so many words.  He told me plainly that it was his interest to let my husband and all my neighbours believe the falsehood—­because, as long as they did so they were quite certain never to suspect the truth.  I had a spirit of my own, and I told him they should know the truth from my lips.  His reply was short, and to the point.  If I spoke, I was a lost woman, as certainly as he was a lost man.

Yes! it had come to that.  He had deceived me about the risk I ran in helping him.  He had practised on my ignorance, he had tempted me with his gifts, he had interested me with his story—­and the result of it was that he made me his accomplice.  He owned this coolly, and he ended by telling me, for the first time, what the frightful punishment really was for his offence, and for any one who helped him to commit it.  In those days the law was not so tender-hearted as I hear it is now.  Murderers were not the only people liable to be hanged, and women convicts were not treated like ladies in undeserved distress.  I confess he frightened me—­ the mean impostor! the cowardly blackguard!  Do you understand now how I hated him?  Do you understand why I am taking all this trouble—­thankfully taking it—­to gratify the curiosity of the meritorious young gentleman who hunted him down?

Well, to go on.  He was hardly fool enough to drive me to downright desperation.  I was not the sort of woman whom it was quite safe to hunt into a corner—­he knew that, and wisely quieted me with proposals for the future.