Two days later, as Lettice was hard at work in her study on a romance which she had begun in June, at the suggestion of a friendly publisher, she was interrupted by a knock at the door. It was a feeble knock, as of one who was half afraid, and the voice, which she heard inquiring for her immediately afterwards was a feeble voice, which she did not recognize.

Nor did she at first remember the face of Mrs. Bundlecombe, when that lady was brought into her room, so much had she changed since her last visit to Maple Cottage. She looked ten years older than when she transferred to her pocket the twenty pounds which Lettice had paid her, though that was barely twelve months ago.

Lettice was better pleased to see her this time; but there was a sinking at her heart as she thought from whom the old lady had come, and wondered what her coming might mean.

Mrs. Bundlecombe produced from her bag a little roll of paper, and laid it on the table with trembling hands.

"There, Miss Campion," she said, taking the chair which Lettice had put for her, "now I feel better already, and I can answer your kind inquiries. I cannot say that I am very well, but there is nothing you can do for me, except take the money back that I came and asked you for a year ago. Don't say anything against it, my dear, for my Alan says it must be done, and there is no use in trying to turn him. It is the right method for peace of conscience, as the good Mr. Baxter said, and that must be my apology, though I am sure you will not think it was nothing but sinful self-seeking that made me come to you before."

"I don't understand, Mrs. Bundlecombe! I simply paid you a debt, did I not? If it was right for my father to pay (as he would have done if he had lived), it was right for me to pay; and as it was right for me to pay, it was right for you to ask. And it gave me pleasure, as I told you at the time, so that I object to taking the money back again."

"That is what I said to Alan, but he would not listen to me. 'Miss Campion was not bound to pay her father's debt,' he said, 'any more than Mr. Campion, and therefore it was wrong for you to ask either of them. But to go to a woman,' he said, 'was more than wrong, it was mean; and I can never look in her face again if you do not take it back and beg her pardon.' He can be very stern, my dear, when he is not pleased, and just now I could not disobey him if he was to tell me to go on my knees through London town."

"How did he know that I had paid you?"

"Well, it was yesterday; we had been in great trouble"—and here Mrs. Bundlecombe broke down, having been very near doing it from the moment when she entered the room. Lettice comforted her as well as she could, and made her drink a glass of wine; and so she gradually recovered her voice.

"Well, as I was saying, my dear, in the evening, when we were quiet by ourselves, he said to me, 'Aunt Bessy, I met Miss Campion last night, and I gather from what she told me that you had seen one another in London. You never mentioned that to me. When was it?' I did not want to make a clean breast of it, but he has such a way of cross-questioning one that I could not keep it back; and that is how it all came out. So you must put up with it, for my sake. I dare not touch the money again, was it ever so."

"Then I must speak to Mr. Walcott about it myself, the next time I see him, for I think he has not been just to you."

"Oh yes, my dear, he has! He is always so just, poor boy!" There was an ominous quaver here. "And it is not as if we wanted money. I had three or four hundred from selling the business, and Alan has nearly that every year—but now he gives two pounds a week——"

Then there was another collapse, and Lettice thought it best to let the old woman have her cry out. Only she went over and sat by her side, and took one of the thin hands between her own, and cried just a little to keep her company.

"Oh, my dear," said Mrs. Bundlecombe at last, "it is such a comfort to have a woman to talk to. I have not had a good talk to one of my own sex since I came up to London, unless it is the landlady in Montagu Place, and she is a poor old antiquity like myself, with none of your soft and gentle ways. It would do me good to tell you all we have gone through since that bad creature found us out, but I have no right to make you miserable with other people's sorrows. No—I will go away before I begin to be foolish again; and my boy will be waiting for me."

"If you think Mr. Walcott would not object to your telling me, and if it will be any relief to you, do! Indeed, I think I would rather hear it."

So Mrs. Bundlecombe poured out her tale to sympathetic ears, and gave Lettice an account of Alan's married life so far as she knew it, and of the return of the runaway, and of the compact which Alan had made with her, and of the post-cards, and the slandering and the threats.

"And the night before last he came home in a terrible rage—that would be after seeing you, my dearie—and he walked about the room for ever so long before he would tell me a word. And then he said,

"'I have seen her again, Aunt Bessy, and she has molested me horribly out in the street, when I was with——'

"And there he stopped short, and fell on the sofa, and cried—yes, dear, he cried like a woman, as if his heart would break; and I guessed why it was, though he did not mention your name. For you know," said Mrs. Bundlecombe, looking at Lettice with mournful eyes, "or leastways you don't know, how he worships the ground——"

"Don't," said Lettice, "don't tell me more than he would like. I—I cannot bear to hear it all!"

"Maybe I have said too much; but you must forgive me if I have. And so, when he was a bit better he said that he should go next morning and tell the lawyer that she had broken her compact, and he would not pay her any more money, but give her notice of the divorce.

"'All the heart and all the mercy is crushed out of me,' he said; 'she has turned her venom on her, and she shall suffer for it.'

"So in the morning he went to his lawyer. And it was the day when she used to call for her money, and she must have called for it and been refused, for early in the afternoon she came round to our lodgings, and went on like a mad woman in the street, shrieking and howling, and saying the most horrible things you can imagine. I could not tell you half she said, about—about us all. Oh dear, oh dear! I had heard what one of those Frenchwomen could be, but I never saw anything like it before, and I hope I never may again!"

"Was he there?"

"Yes, he was there. And he said to me, 'If I give her in charge, it will have to go into the police court, and anything is better than that!' But then she mentioned—she began to say other things, and he said, 'My God, if this is not stopped, I shall do her an injury!' So I went out, and fetched a policeman, and that put an end to it for the time.

"You can fancy that my poor Alan is nearly out of his mind, not knowing what she may be up to next. One thing he is afraid of more than anything: and to be sure I don't think he cares for anything else. Ever since I let out your name on that first night he has been dreading what might happen to you through her spite and malice!"

Lettice was deeply moved by Mrs. Bundlecombe's story, and as the old woman finished she kissed her on the cheek.

"Tell him," she said, "that I have heard what he has suffered—that I asked you, and you told me. Tell him not to think of me because I am forewarned, and am not afraid of anything she can do. And tell him that he should not think of punishing her, for the punishment she has brought upon herself is enough."

"I will repeat it word for word, my dearie, and it will comfort him to have a message from you. But I doubt he will not spare her now, for she is more than flesh and blood can bear."

Then Lettice took her visitor to her mother's room, and made tea for her, and left the two to compare notes with each other for half an hour. Thus Mrs. Bundlecombe went away comforted, and took some comfort back with her to the dingy room in Alfred Place.

It was hard for Lettice to turn to her work again, as though nothing had happened since she last laid down her pen. The story to which she had listened, and the picture which it brought so vividly before her mind of the lonely, persecuted man who pined for her love when she had no right to give it, nor he to ask for it, compelled her to realize what she had hitherto fought away and kept in the background. She could no longer cheat herself with the assurance that her heart was in her own keeping, and that her feeling for Alan was one of mere womanly pity.

She loved him; and she would not go on lying to her own heart by saying that she did not.

Her character was not by any means perfect; but, as with all of us, a mixture of good and ill—the evil and the good often springing out of the same inborn qualities of her nature. She had a keen sense of enjoyment in hearing and seeing new things, in broaching new ideas and entering upon fresh fields of thought; and her appetite in these respects was all the stronger for the gloom and seclusion in which the earlier years of her womanhood had been spent. She was lavish in generosity to her friends, and did not count the cost when she wanted to be kind. But as the desire for enjoyment may be carried to the length of self-indulgence, so there is often a selfishness in giving and a recklessness in being over kind. Lettice, moreover, was extravagant in the further sense that she did not look much beyond the present month or present year of existence. She thought her sun would always shine.

Her blemishes were quite compatible with her virtues, with the general right-mindedness and brave performance of duty which had hitherto marked her life. She was neither bad nor perhaps very good, but just such a woman as Nature selects to be the instrument of her most mysterious workings.

If Lettice admitted to herself the defeat which she had sustained in one quarter, she was all the less disposed to accept a check elsewhere. Her will to resist a hopeless love was broken down, but that only increased the strength of her determination to conceal the weakness from every eye, to continue the struggle of life as though there were no flaw in her armor, and to work indefatigably for the independence of thought and feeling and action which she valued above all other possessions.

So she chained herself to her desk, and finished her romance, which in its later chapters gained intensity of pathos and dramatic insight from the constant immolation of her own heart as she imagined the martyrdoms and sacrifices of others.

The story which was to make her famous had been conceived in sorrow, and it became associated with the greatest sufferings of her life. She had scarcely sent it off to the publisher, in the month of October, when her mother, who had been gradually failing both in body and in mind, quietly passed away in her sleep. No death could have been easier. The heart had done its work, and ceased to beat; but though Lettice was spared the grief which she would have felt if her mother had lingered long on a painful death-bed, the shock was still very severe. For a time she was entirely prostrated by it. The manifold strain upon her mind had tried her too much, and for several weeks after the funeral Clara Graham was nursing her through a dangerous illness.