It must have been in some moment of contrition that Mrs. Barrett had penned the words with which from her grave she now spoke for her injured daughter. Something, sure, had prompted her to keep the letter and write the explanation which brought such joy to Col. Schuyler. The losing faith in Edith’s integrity, the belief that she was artful, intriguing, and deceitful, had hurt him a thousandfold more than the humiliation of having married the widow of Abelard Lyle. He had hardly given that a serious thought, so great was his disappointment at having found Edith false as he believed; and when she was proved otherwise his joy was as acute as his grief had been intense. Every circumstance which bore at all upon the matter came back to him, and he remembered so distinctly the many times since their marriage when Edith had tried to tell him. At the inn where they stopped on their bridal night she had stolen to his side, with the confession on her lips, and he had not listened to her, but had bidden her never allude to the past again, as he was satisfied. Dear Edith, he said, aloud, and felt again the pressure of her hand on his shoulder where she had lain it, and heard the falter in her voice as she first called him Howard. How she must have suffered then and afterward when he insisted upon taking her with him to the Lyles. He knew now the secret of her silence, which he had called pride. The iron fingers were on her throat, and she could not talk in Abelard’s home with that dreadful Jenny sitting there. And _she_ was Edith’s sister-in-law! The colonel shivered from head to foot when he remembered that, and a flush of shame and mortification spread over his pale face. He had yet to fight these feelings down, and he did it manfully, and said to himself again and again: “I love her just as wall, now that I know she did not mean to deceive me, just as well as if she had never seen those Lyles, who seem thrust upon me at every point, first through Emma and then through Edith, my wife.”