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Playmore's advice, so as to be within an easy journey to Edinburgh in case it might be necessary for me to consult him personally. Three more weeks of weary expectation passed before a second letter reached me. This time it was impossible to say whether the news were good or bad. It might have been either it was simply bewildering. Even Mr. Playmore himself was taken by surprise.
Whether I unconsciously drew on that inexhaustible store of indulgence which a woman always keeps in reserve for a man who owns that he has need of her, or whether, resenting as I did Mr. Playmore's horrible suspicion of him, my heart was especially accessible to feelings of compassion in his unhappy case, I cannot tell.
Playmore's letter this morning; and I am really almost ashamed to mention it I have been trying experiments on torn letters, off and on, ever since. You won't tell upon me, will you?" I answered the dear old man by a hearty embrace. Now that he had lost his steady moral balance, and had caught the infection of my enthusiasm, I loved him better than ever.
The closing lines of the medical report which I had read in Mr. Playmore's office recurred to my memory in the stillness of the night "When the catastrophe has happened, his friends can entertain no hope of his cure: the balance once lost, will be lost for life." The confirmation of that terrible sentence was not long in reaching me.
Macallan's house suggested that he had not endured my long absence very patiently, and that he was still as far as ever from giving his shattered nervous system its fair chance of repose. The next morning brought me Mr. Playmore's reply to the letter which I had addressed to him from Paris.
If there is more news to tell you by that time you will hear of it from Mr. Playmore." Mr. Playmore's postscript followed, dated three days later. "The concluding part of the late Mrs. Macallan's letter to her husband," the lawyer wrote, "has proved accidentally to be the first part which we have succeeded in piecing together.
What did Lady Clarinda say about Mrs. Beauly? All that you wanted to hear?" "All, and more," I answered. "What? what? what?" he cried wild with impatience in a moment. Mr. Playmore's last prophetic words were vividly present to my mind.
He had not only done all that I had anticipated in the way of falsifying Mr. Playmore's prediction he had actually advanced beyond my limits. I could go the length of recognizing Mrs. Beauly's innocence; but at that point I stopped. If the Defense at the Trial were the right defense, farewell to all hope of asserting my husband's innocence. I held to that hope as I held to my love and my life.
Playmore's letter had not prepared me for the serious deterioration in him which I could now discern. His features were pinched and worn; the whole face seemed to have wasted strangely in substance and size since I had last seen it. The softness in his eyes was gone. Blood-red veins were intertwined all over them now: they were set in a piteous and vacant stare.
Playmore's express request, to consult with me as to the future, and to enlighten me as to the past. He presented me with his credentials in the shape of a little note from the lawyer. I have done my best, with Mr. Benjamin's assistance, to find the right explanation of these debatable matters; and I have treated the subject, for the sake of brevity, in the form of Questions and Answers.
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