The Colonel took his wife’s arm, drawing her close to him, leaning over her little figure: he could hold her closer in this way, and take her strength more completely into his own than if she had taken his arm in the ordinary fashion. But she gave him but an uncertain support for the first time in their life. The group made up of those two figures linked into one, making but one shadow, tottered as they set out. And she made no reply to his look, to the urgent clasp of his arm on hers, until they had passed out of the village street, and gained the quiet and stillness of the avenue within the gates. Then Elizabeth—unprecedented action!—detached herself almost with impatience. ‘You hurt me, Henry,’ she said quickly, with a sharp intolerance in her tone. This brought the painful excitement of the morning to a climax; for when had she complained before?
‘My dear!’ he cried, with a tone of compunction and horror, ‘I—hurt you?’ as if he had been accused of high treason and brutal cruelty combined.
This accent of amazed contrition brought Mrs. Hayward to herself. ‘Oh no, Henry,’ she said, ‘you did not hurt me at all. I am not fit to speak to any good Christian. I am a wretched creature, full of envy, and malice, and all uncharitableness. Let me alone a little till I come to myself.’
The Colonel gave her a piteous look. ‘As long as you please, my dear,’ he said; then added apologetically, ‘I can’t help feeling very anxious. There is more in this than meets the eye—there is more in it than I realised: there is—the—the young lady, Elizabeth.’
In spite of herself his wife looked at him with a momentary scorn which was almost fierce. ‘Do you mean to say that this is the first time you have thought of that?’
The Colonel was very apologetic. ‘I am afraid I am dense,
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’ he said; ‘but, my dear, I always like to wait till I know what you think—and as yet you have said nothing. How was I to suppose——’ Here he broke off, seeing in his wife’s eyes more than he could read all at once, and with a tremulous movement laid his hand again upon her arm. ‘What is it?’ he said.
She was tremulous too, but in a different fashion. She began to open out a little parcel which she held in her hand quickly, almost with indignation. ‘You will know what to think when you see you own hand and name,’ she said. ‘There! that’s been laid up waiting for me—fancy! for me to find it—these twenty years.’
The Colonel looked at the yellow old letters with increasing agitation, but no increase of understanding. ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What does it mean, Elizabeth? I did not go through all this, only to come to an old letter of my own at the last.’
The little woman stamped her foot with a kind of fury. ‘I think you are determined not to understand,’ she cried. ‘Look who that letter is addressed to—look at this other along with it; for God’s sake, Henry, don’t worry me any more! don’t ask what I think: look at them for yourself.’
He did look, but with so bewildered an expression that compassion overcame her. She took the papers over which he was puzzling, looking at his own writing vaguely, with a quick impatient movement.
‘You have been right, quite right in your conjectures,’ she said; ‘the poor girl that came here alone twenty years ago, and had her baby, and went wrong in her head, and died, was your poor young wife, Joyce Hayward, Henry. There is your letter to her—not the kind of letter I should have thought you would have written; and there is hers to you, a voice out of the grave. Don’t look at me in that pitiful way. I don’t expect you to read it here. Go away to your own room or into the woods, Henry, and read your wife’s letter. Go away! go away! and do this for yourself without me. I am not the person,’ cried Mrs. Hayward, thrusting them into his hands, and pushing him impatiently from her,— ‘I am not the person to read your wife’s letter. Go away! go away!’
‘My wife’s letter,’ he said, with a momentary look of awe and trouble. Then suddenly he put one arm round her, and, half sobbing, said, ‘Twenty years since! it has always been right, all the time, my darling, between you and me.’
‘Oh, Henry!—is that all you think of at such a moment?’
He patted her shoulder with his large and unsteady hand, and
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 held her close. ‘If it is not all, it’s the first and foremost,’ he said; ‘you will never again, Elizabeth, never any more——’
‘Oh, go away! go away!’ she cried, stamping her foot upon the path. There were tears in her eyes, half love and softness, half impatience and fury. She pushed him away from her with all her strength, and turning her back upon him, walked quickly through the trees and across the park in the full sunshine. She was distracted with conflicting sentiments, unwilling to be melted, yet touched to the heart; determined that he should go back by himself into that distant past with which she had nothing to do, yet scarcely able to resist the habit of doing everything for him, of encountering even that for him. She hurried along until she had got within the shade of a belt of wood, and out of sight of the spot where she had left her husband. Here Mrs. Hayward suddenly sat down upon the grass, and hid her face in her hands. Sometimes it became necessary for her, even in the ordinary course of affairs, to escape for a moment now and then from the Colonel’s constant demands. But to-day it seemed to her that she must do this or die. The sudden summons, the long journey, the agitating news, the commission so suddenly put into her hands, the discovery she had made, all united had overwhelmed her at last. She cried heartily, as she did everything, with an abundant natural overthrow of feeling which relieved and exhausted her, and a sensation underneath all which she could not define whether it was happiness or pain.
This Joyce, who had been from the beginning the shadow upon her married life, in despite of whose possible claims she had married, and whom she had regarded all through with a mixture of pity and indignation and fear, roused in her, dead, almost as strong feelings as if she had been a living claimant to the name and place which were hers. The very fact that the poor girl’s story was so pitiful, and that nothing could take away the interest and compassion roused by the image of a young forsaken creature dying so miserably with no one near who loved her, was to Mrs. Hayward at this moment an additional aggravation, adding a pang to all the rest. And yet there was in it an unspeakable relief; and the fact that this, and not any revival of the romance of his youth, had been her husband’s first thought, was exquisite to her, yet with a certain acrid sweetness, not unmingled with pain and the contradictoriness of a highly sensitive, impatient, and intolerant soul, sharply conscious of every complication. For notwithstanding her strong personal share in the matter, it was clear to Elizabeth that he ought to have thought of the other, the poor girl in
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 her youth and misery, first; and that the sight of her letter, the words written in her anguish, coming to him as it were from her grave, across the silence of twenty years, ought to have transported the man to whom these words were addressed out of all recollection of the present,—out of everything save that tragedy of which, however innocently, he was the cause. She could not but feel it sweet that it was herself and not the dead Joyce of whom in reality he had thought: yet, in a manner, she resented it, and was wounded by it as a thing against nature which ought not to have been. ‘That is all that a man’s love is worth,’ she said to herself. ‘He cost her her life, and it is me he thinks of, who am well and strong, and in no trouble.’ And yet it went to her heart that he should have so thought.
In this keen complication of feeling, Mrs. Hayward, for the time, could realise nothing else. It was not possible to think of the dead girl and herself but as rivals: and this, too, gave her a pang. How mean, how ungenerous, how miserable it was! Such a story in a book, much more in real life, would have moved her to warm tears; but in this, which touched herself so closely, she could feel no true pity. It was her rival; it was one who had come before her, whose shadow had lain upon her life and darkened it, who even now was bringing trouble into it—trouble of which it was impossible to fathom the full extent. How could there be tenderness where such sharp antagonism was? And yet, how poor, how small, how petty, how unworthy was the feeling!
In these contrarieties her mind was caught, and thrilled with sharp vexation, shame, scorn of herself, and sense of that profound vanity of human things which makes the present in its pettiness so much greater than the past, and dims and obliterates everything that is over. To think that such a tragedy had been, and that those who were most concerned thought of their poor share in it first, and not of her who was the victim! That contradiction of all that was most true and just, that infidelity which is in every human thing, the callousness and egotism which ran through the best, jarred her with a discord which was in herself as well as in all the rest. But when she had cried her heart out, Mrs. Hayward, as was natural, exhausted that first poignant sensation, and came to contemplate, apart from all that was past, the present condition of affairs, which was not more consolatory. Indeed, when, putting the tragedy of the poor Joyce who was dead out of her mind, she returned to the present, the figure of the living Joyce suddenly rose before her with a sharp distinctness that
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 made her spring to her feet as a soldier springs to his weapon when suddenly confronted by an enemy. Mrs. Hayward had never seen Joyce, so that this figure............