A Woman Martyr

								

herself one of the dramatis personæ in a living loveplay.  This and
ensuing love-letters proved the young man a clever scribe. He
represented himself as a member of a distinguished family, banished from
home on account of his political opinions.  The secret correspondence
continued; then, with the assistance of a bribed housemaid whose mental
pabulum was low class novelettes with impossible illustrations of seven
feet high countesses and their elongated curly-haired lovers, there were
brief, passionate meetings.  When Joan was just recovering from her
grief at her father’s recent death, the climax came.  Her mother
died--her lawyers sent for her.  When she returned to school, it was
with the knowledge that the rich uncle intended to take her from thence,
why and for what she did not know; that her godmother acknowledged his
right to deal with her future, and that her days in C---- were numbered.
With what agony and humiliation she remembered that next wildly
emotional meeting with the man she fancied she loved--his passionate
pleading that she would be his--her reluctant consent--their meeting in
town a few weeks later when she had boldly fled from school to her old
nurse in the little suburban house where she let lodgings, and their
marriage before the Registrar, to attain which Victor Mercier had
falsely stated her age, and their parting immediately after!  She went
to her uncle somewhat in disgrace because of her precipitate flight from
school.  But her beauty and the pathos of her orphanhood, also a secret
remorse on his part for his hardheartedness to her dead parents, induced
him to consider it a girlish freak alone, and to ignore it as such.
She had hardly become settled in her new, luxurious home when the blow
fell which at first seemed to shatter her whole life at once and for
ever.  She read in a daily paper of a discovered fraud in the branch
office at C---- of a London house, and of the flight and disappearance
of the manager, Victor Mercier.
To recall those succeeding days and weeks of secret anguish, fear, dread
and sickening horror, made her shiver even now.  In her desperation she
had confided in her old nurse.  "But for her, I should have gone mad!"
she told herself, with a shudder.
"You will never see him again, my pretty; all you have to do is to
forget the brute!" was the burden of Nurse Todd’s song of consolation.
"Such as him daren’t ever show his face at Sir Thomas’!  Your husbin’?
The law ’ud soon rid ye of a husbin’ of his sort! But there won’t be no
call for that!  He’s as dead as a doornail in this country--and, you’re
not likely ever to see him again!"
And now he had come to life, and in the Duke’s livery!
"He was one of the auxiliaries, of course!" Joan told herself.  "But how
does he dare to be here?  If only I had the courage to tell Uncle--all!
I believe he might forgive me. But I could never face Vansittart
again--if he knew!  It would be giving up his love, and that--that I