‘There was no one to care what I did, no one for me to care for. Nothing seemed to matter. I plunged into all the follies—and worse—of a young man about town. I will not disgust you by describing them—suffice it that I found plenty both of men and women to share them with me. I tried to drown remembrance of Her, of you, of everything noble and good, in pleasure. And at last, you will hardly be surprised to hear, I fell into my old madness of drink. I was horribly, quite horribly, you understand, hopeless and unhappy. About my own people I say nothing—to their own Master they stand or fall. I do not want to talk, or even think about them. But by last autumn I had pretty well ruined my health. I had, so the doctors told me, delirium tremens. I know my nerves were shattered, and life seemed a perfect hell. As I lay ill and mad, Fédore came to me. She nursed me, controlled me, pulled me through. She was most true to me when others wished her to be most false. There were those, she has told me since—as I suspected all along, even in the old days at Hover—who would be glad enough for me to kill myself with debauchery. She talked to me, reasoned with me. You yourself could not have spoken more wisely. But I felt, Brownlow, I felt I could not stand alone. I must have some one to lean on, to be loved by and to love. It is a necessity of my nature, and I obeyed it. Fédore saved me, and I paid her by marrying her. She refused at first, warned me of my seeming folly, of what the world would say; told me there were difficulties, that she, too, had enemies. But I insisted.—Remember she had compromised herself, endangered her reputation by coming to me.—At last she gave way, confessing, dear creature, she had loved me all along, loved me from a boy. ‘You will say, what about the future? I defy it, snap my fingers at it. It must take care of itself. It can’t, in any case, be more hateful than the past. ‘And so good-bye, dear old man. Judge me fairly at least; and keep my secret—for secret our marriage must be as long as my father is alive. Fédore sends kind remembrances, and bids me say when you know all—and there is more behind—you will not think of her too harshly.’ Should I not? The woman had greater faith in my leniency—or stupidity, which?—than I myself had. No harshness was too great, surely, in face of the wrong she had done the boy by marrying him. Yet two things were true. For that she loved him—according to her own conception of love—I did not doubt; and that she had rescued him from the demon of drink—for the time being—I did not doubt either. And this last—let me try to be just—this last must be counted to her, in some degree at all events, for righteousness whatever her ulterior object in so rescuing him might have been.