The Law and the Lady

"You here!" he said to her.

"How do you do, Eustace?" she quietly rejoined. "Have you heard of your aunt's illness too? Did you know she was staying at Ramsgate?"

He made no answer. The landlady, drawing the inevitable inference from the words that she had just heard, looked from me to my mother-in-law in a state of amazement, which paralyzed even her tongue. I waited with my eyes on my husband, to see what he would do. If he had delayed acknowledging me another moment, the whole future course of my life might have been altered--I should have despised him.

He did not delay. He came to my side and took my hand.

"Do you know who this is?" he said to his mother.

She answered, looking at me with a courteous bend of her head: "A lady I met on the beach, Eustace, who kindly restored to me a letter that I dropped. I think I heard the name" (she turned to the landlady): "Mrs. Woodville, was it not?"

My husband's fingers unconsciously closed on my hand with a grasp that hurt me. He set his mother right, it is only just to say, without one cowardly moment of hesitation.

"Mother," he said to her, very quietly, "this lady is my wife."

She had hitherto kept her seat. She now rose slowly and faced her son in silence. The first expression of surprise passed from her face. It was succeeded by the most terrible look of mingled indignation and contempt that I ever saw in a woman's eyes.

"I pity your wife," she said.

With those words and no more, lifting her hand she waved him back from her, and went on her way again, as we had first found her, alone.