IT is a terrible thing to be left alone with one’s dead, and this might in some sort be said to have been Margaret’s case when Mrs. Jordan had departed. Her Willie had become as dead to her; all that was left of him was the shameful record that lay upon the table before her. Never more—save once—was she to see his face again in this life, nor did she desire to do so. She would have shrunk from his hand had he offered it to her, and the touch of his lips would have been contamination. He had obtained her kisses as it were under false pretences, and she flushed with shame when she thought of them. She did not conceal from herself that his behaviour up to the very last had been in keeping with his whole career. He should have come in person, whatever it had cost him, and confessed his guilt, and not have left her a prey to unfounded terrors. It was cowardly and base and selfish. Miserable as she had been on his account an hour ago, she was now infinitely more wretched. It was better to have thought him dead—and honest, than to know he was alive and a cheat. ‘He is only seventeen, remember,’ had been Mrs. Jordan’s words in appeal to her charity and pity, but they found no response in Margaret’s bosom. ‘One can forgive anything at seventeen,’ was her reflection, ‘save hypocrisy and deceit.’ She forgave him as a very charitable person might forgive a cardsharper; there was no malice nor hatred in her heart against him, but she could never take him to her heart again. Was it possible, she wondered, that he could have been always base? When he had made that passionate protestation in Anne Hathaway’s garden, for example, and besought her only to keep her heart free for him for a little time, to give him a chance of proving himself worthy of her; had he had this hateful plan of fraud and falsehood in his mind even then? If he was not to be believed _then_, if what he said then was not the utterance of genuine love and honesty, what word of man was to be credited? And if he was honest then, when did he begin to lie? It had been her intention not to read this hateful paper; to commit it to the flames; but a sort of terrible curiosity now urged her to peruse it. She had no expectation of finding in it any mitigation of her lost lover’s conduct; any plea for pardon or even for pity. She had no wish to hear what he had to say for himself; only a certain morbid interest in it.