charming confusion in so wise and clever a woman, that there was a clerk lad at home, an old acquaintance, and that indeed she had not concealed the engagement between them from any deceit, Letty was troubled lest she should give that impression, but her friend Mrs. Peaston had known it all along, and for any one else Letty did not know how to speak of such things. That was Letty’s explanation of the fact that, with her, love was as sacred and deeply rooted as religion, and one of Letty’s young ladies, who was unavoidably privy to the incident, cried out with refreshing satisfaction that she had guessed the solution of Letty’s riddle.
Mrs. Bridgewater, affectionate though she was, had very little pity to spare to the Colonel’s disappointment—an absurd old man to be impetuous and heedless at his years—and he took his refusal coolly, after all; she saw him having his customary airing, and he sent and borrowed Mr. Bridgewater’s “Galignani,” exactly as if nothing had happened.
Naturally Letty experienced deeper gratitude and more tender pity, the more clearly defined and unmixed because the Colonel, once satisfied of her calm, deliberate decision, did not attempt to shake it. Though Letty was true as steel to George Ashe—and it was not a distinguished half-martial, half-superannuated Colonel who could have moved her from her allegiance—her heart smote her when the old man’s voice faltered as he bade her a courteous good-bye, and she turned back again to give more emphatic instructions to the good-humoured cook how her Colonel liked his lamb and salad, and to implore the gallant Italian, for her friendship, to serve with clockwork punctuality the meals of this generalissimo.
Afterwards, the episode faded from Letty’s preoccupied heart and active life, and left only a shadowy incident—half-mirthful, half-melancholy—behind.
III.
Letty Brown’s travels were over, and her single life with them. She was Letty Brown no more, but Letty Ashe, one of the million; the poor clerk’s wife, with her narrow household cares, and toilsome household drudgery. Never mind, Letty never looked handsomer or happier than when she arranged the scanty furniture, and made the markets in the circumscribed flat in the ugly, crowded manufacturing town. Letty was such a young wife, so stately, and so sweet, so civil to her neighbours, so genuinely frank and kind to old friends, and above all, such a companion, friend, mistress, lady to George Ashe, though she had worked as a factory girl once, and he was never likely to be more than a poor clerk to the end of the chapter, that it was good to see her.
Letty had been cooking her husband’s dinner, and was skilfully and pleasantly beautifying his dwelling; she was dusting the cage with her turtle—a remembrance from the land of turtles—and she was setting out her flowers, cheap primroses and periwinkles, as she used to deck her old Mile-end factory loom, and with new, graceful ideas, brought from the fragrant myrtles and oleanders on the altars in old classic Roman lands, when the postman’s knock resounded, and she received a letter—a London letter—not for Mrs. George Ashe, but for Lettice Brown.
Letty was a little puzzled as she read the address in an unfamiliar hand; she had no friend that she knew of in London but the Bridgewaters, and they not only were apprised of her marriage, but had loaded her with wedding-presents, useful and ornamental—the polished chiffonnier, the embroidered table-cover, the fanciful cake-basket (Letty would surely eat cake sometimes) were all from the Bridgewaters.
Letty did not open the letter instantly, and reach the bottom of the mystery. She was not excitable, this young woman, in her sound sagacity: she was rather slow at adopting a fancy, though swift at making an observation. She was engrossed with what she was about—she had no pressing interests apart from her own home. She put down the letter, half-determining not to open it till George came home; then she took it up again, and burst the envelope, and read, first a lawyer’s exceedingly civil preamble, second a copy of the substance of the will of the late Hugh William Annesley, Lieutenant-Colonel in one of Her Majesty’s dragoon regiments, devising and bequeathing to Lettice Brown, formerly of Moorfield (he had incidentally, as it were, asked her the name of her native place the very morning she took leave of him), the bulk of his fortune, and his house at Bayswater, with its plate and furniture. The testator stated that all his relations were distant in degree, and in affluent circumstances, and that he made this disposition of his property, he being in sound mind, as a proof of his respect and esteem for the said Lettice Brown, in further testimony of which he left the legacy without limitation or reservation, beyond the necessary legacy duty, which the lawyer took the opportunity to apprise her it was her business to pay.
Letty read the communication three times before she admitted the importance of its contents, and laid them to heart; and the first thing she did after she knew that she was an heiress—a great heiress for Letty’s antecedents—and that George Ashe was rich and able to lead a life of leisure, and indulge his tastes, was to sit down with the tears rolling down her cheeks, making them wan in their paleness—and Letty seldom cried—and to pray God that He would enable her and her husband to bear their unexpected and unexampled prosperity. It was not that Letty was narrow-minded, or superstitious, or childish, and so incapable of comprehending riches, but because she fathomed not only their advantages and benefits, but their temptations and trials, both with judgment and sensibility; and the first abrupt contemplation overcame her, sitting there crying and shaking, half with pleasure, half with pain, trying to recall her stiff, eccentric benefactor, trying to think of telling George, and of what he would feel and say. Letty was roused by her turtle, accustomed to leave his cage and fly to her shoulder, coming softly to his resting-place, and pressing his silver-grey and cinnamon-brown