"I know little about it," observed the Major. "She never wrote to me at all afterwards, and you wrote me but two letters: the one announcing the fact of her disgrace; the other, the calamity and the deaths." "That is quite enough to know; don't ask me to go over the details to you personally," said Mr. Hamlyn in a tone of passionate discomfort. "So utterly repugnant to me is the remembrance altogether, that I have never spoken of it--even to my present wife." "Do you mean you've not told her you were once a married man?" cried Major Pratt. "No, I have not." "Then you've shown a lack of judgment which I wouldn't have given you credit for, my friend," declared the Major. "A man may whisper to his girl any untoward news he pleases of his past life, and she'll forgive and forget; aye, and worship him all the more for it, though it were the having set fire to a church: but if he keeps it as a bonne bouchée to drop out after marriage, when she has him fast and tight, she'll curry-comb his hair for him in style. Believe that." Mr. Hamlyn laughed. "There never was a hidden skeleton between man and wife yet but it came to light sooner or later," went on the Major. "If you are wise, you will tell her at once, before somebody else does." "What 'somebody?' Who is there here that knows it?" "Why, as to 'here,' I know it, and nearly spoke of it before her, as you must have heard; and my servant knows it. That's nothing, you'll say; we can be quiet, now I have the cue: but you are always liable to meet with people who knew you in those days, and who knew _her_. Take my advice, Philip Hamlyn, and tell your wife. Go and do it now." "I daresay you are right," said the younger man, awaking out of a reverie. "Of the two evils it may be the lesser." And with lagging steps, and eyes that seemed to have weights to them, he set out to walk back to the Old Ship Hotel. THE SILENT CHIMES IV.--NOT HEARD I That oft-quoted French saying, a mauvais-quart-d'heure, is a pregnant one, and may apply to small as well as to great worries of life: most of us know it to our cost. But, rely upon it, one of the very worst is that when a bride or bridegroom has to make a disagreeable confession to the other, which ought to have been made before going to church. Philip Hamlyn was finding it so. Standing over the fire, in their sitting-room at the Old Ship Hotel at Brighton, his elbow on the mantelpiece, his hand shading his eyes, he looked down at his wife sitting opposite him, and disclosed his tale: that when he married her fifteen days ago he had not been a bachelor, but a widower. There was no especial reason for his not having told her, save that he hated and abhorred that earlier period of his life and instinctively shunned its remembrance.