"If you are not sufficiently composed to hear what it is my duty to say, I will leave you and come again in an hour."
She motioned to him to remain, and her trembling hands then stretched themselves toward a bottle of water on the table. He poured some into a glass, which he placed close to her. Rallying a little she managed to raise the glass to her lips, and to drink, the cold draught revived her fainting senses.
"Speak," she said. "Say what you have to say."
"Had my brother lived," said Leonard, "the time would have come when he would have been compelled to make the disclosure himself. Being gone, the duty which was his devolves upon me. It may be that he would have righted the wrong he did you, for he was weak and easily prevailed upon. I do not seek to excuse him, and it is certain that he acted as he deemed best when he deceived you. Are you attending to me? Shall I go on?"
"When you were lying at death's door in the village to which you had flown, the name of which you probably remember--" He purposely paused here, to afford her an opportunity of answering him.
"I do not remember it," she said. "If I heard it, it has gone from me. My mind was a blank."
"He was informed by the doctor," continued Leonard, with guilty satisfaction, "who attended you that there was only one means of restoring your reason, and that was to make you his wife. It was then he conceived the idea of a sham marriage ceremony. It must be clear to you, as it is to every person gifted with common-sense, that it was not possible for you to marry him or any man in your state of mind. No minister would have sanctioned such a marriage, and you could not, therefore, be married in church. It was easy for Gerald to devise a mock civil marriage, and to carry you away immediately to a foreign country in order that you should not discover the deception. You have been witness of the love which existed between him and me; his death is to me an irreparable loss. I endeavored to dissuade him from his purpose, but he would not listen to me: weak and amiable as he was, he had a soul of obstinacy when his mind was strongly set, and my words of counsel fell upon ears which were deaf to all the arguments I could use. I saw that there was a danger that the strong love we had for each other might be sapped if I thwarted him, and I could bear anything but that. My dear, dear brother! His spirit is with me day and night, and I forgive him for the action, although many would condemn him for it. Now, perhaps, you can understand why you are looked upon with disfavor here in this place--with something more than disfavor, indeed, with repugnance. They regard your presence as a shame and a scandal, and young girls are enjoined by their parents to avoid you. Since my dear Gerald's death the true story of your relations with him has in some way become known. It is not unlikely that he himself confided it to some person, perhaps to the village priest; and, to speak plainly, your position here is a little worse than it was in your native town in England, from which you had to fly. It is out of a feeling of kindness to you that I tell you it will be best for you to leave as soon as possible. The simple people will not tolerate you among them, and they may show their feelings toward you in a more practical manner than they have yet done. To enable you to escape I have a proposition to make to you, if you care to listen to it."