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Updated: June 26, 2025
Dornham would for the first time in her life have been quite happy. Then it was that Lady Arleigh began slowly to droop, then it was that her desolate life became utterly intolerable that her sorrow became greater than she could bear. She must have some one near her, she felt some one with whom she could speak or she should go mad. She longed for her mother.
"Madaline!" he cried, as he entered the cottage, and she came running to him, "should you like a drive with me to-morrow?" he asked. "I am going to Corfell, and I will promise to take you if you will be a good girl." She promised for a drive with the doctor was her greatest earthly delight. "Bring her to my house about three to-morrow afternoon, Mrs. Dornham," said Dr.
Lord Arleigh tried to read the secret of the man's guilt or innocence in his face. Henry Dornham returned the gaze fearlessly. "What do you want with me?" he asked. "You are what we call a swell. I know by the look of you. What do you want with me?" The voice, like the face, was peculiar, not unpleasant deep, rich, with a clear tone, yet not in the least like Madaline's voice.
Rapidly enough Lord Charlewood filled up another paper, which was signed by the doctor and himself; then Stephen Letsom gathered them all together. Margaret Dornham saw him take from the sideboard a plain oaken box bound in brass, and lock the papers in it. "There will be no difficulty about the little lady's identification while this lasts," he said, "and the papers remain undestroyed."
He passed through well-nigh every stage of feeling from the bright rapture of hope to the lowest depths of despair. He went first to Scotland Yard, and had a long interview with the detective who had given evidence against Henry Dornham. The detective's idea was that he was emphatically "a bad lot."
But all was in vain; and on the very day that Lord Charlewood arrived at Castledene the child died. When a tender nurse and foster-mother was needed for little Madaline, the doctor thought of Margaret Dornham. He felt that all difficulty was at an end. He sent for her.
"I shall never be able to part with her. Sometimes I think I shall run away with her and hide her." How little she dreamed that there was a prophecy in the words! "Her father has the first claim," said Dr. Letsom. "It may be hard for us to lose her, but she belongs to him." "He will never love her as I do," observed Margaret Dornham.
And the truth that she had to tell him was that the separation was slowly but surely killing his wife. Margaret Dornham knew no peace until she had carried out her intention. It was but right, she said to herself, that Lord Arleigh should know that his fair young wife was dying. "What right had he to marry her?" she asked herself indignantly, "if he meant to break her heart?"
It was true, but she knew at the same time that, if she would only open the box of papers, she would not be ignorant of any one point; for those papers she had firmly resolved never to touch, so that in saying she knew nothing of the child's identity she would be speaking the bare truth. At first Henry Dornham was indignant.
There was all a woman's love in his heart and in his face, as he bent down to kiss it and say farewell. "In three years' time, when I come back again," he said, "she will be three years old she will walk and talk. You must teach her to say my name, Mrs. Dornham, and teach her to love me."
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