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Updated: May 11, 2025
The Continent was her chosen field of action, and Monte Carlo the point toward which she steadily set her face; until, at last, one Lovely October day, five months after her marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Archibald McPherson, of Stoneleigh, Wales, were registered at the Hotel d'Angleterre, and look possession of one of the cheapest rooms, until they could afford a better.
"Yes, tell me," Lucy said, and closing his eyes, and leaning back wearily in his chair, Grey told her everything he knew with regard to Bessie McPherson, who had died in Rome, and whose grave he had stood beside in the yard at Stoneleigh; told her, too, of Bessie's engagement to Neil, of which he had heard from Jack Trevellian, and of Neil's apparent heartlessness and indifference when he met him in the streets of Liverpool.
On the contrary, he bent every energy to keep the secret from her, and never again mentioned Bessie or Stoneleigh in her presence, but devoted himself to Blanche in a friendly, brotherly kind of way, which kept the peace in that quarter and left him in quiet. But his thoughts were busy with plans for the future, when Bessie would be his wife and he disinherited, for her sake.
Dishwashing, sweeping, dusting, bed making, and many other more menial things it had done at intervals to save old Dorothy, the only female domestic at Stoneleigh. But it was a very pretty hand for all that, and Jack Trevellian felt a great desire to squeeze it as it lay in his broad palm.
"Murderer!" he said to himself again, "do you wish Dick dead and Hal, too, the finest fellow that ever lived, for the sake of a young girl whose mind is full of a prig like Neil McPherson?" And so he put all thoughts of Bessie aside, and wore mourning for his great-uncle, and wrote a letter to the new heir, Sir Dick, and sent his love to Flossie, and went no more to Stoneleigh.
This, however, he kept from his wife, who, dismissing Stoneleigh from her mind, resumed her daily routine of duties baths at seven, music in the park at eight, breakfast at ten, gossip till one, sleeping till three, driving at four, dressing for dinner, dining at six, and going to the casino in the evening. This was her life, while the Hon.
Neil had no doubt that Grey would try to win her when once he had seen her, and he began at last to feel sorry that he had invited his friend to Stoneleigh, and to have doubts as to his ability to give Bessie up even to him. He was sure of it when he reached Stoneleigh and saw her with the brightness on her face and the sparkle in her eye as she welcomed him.
He told me then of his love for you, and I confessed mine to him, though we both supposed that, had you lived, Neil would have claimed you as his. Oh, Bessie, those were dreary months to me, when I thought you dead, and may you never know the anguish I endured when I stood by that grave in Stoneleigh and believed you lying there. But God has been very good to me, far better than I deserve.
The lover of fine trees should wander through the glades of Lord Leigh's park at Stoneleigh, in Warwickshire, where tall and shapely oaks grow with such symmetry that you do not guess their size, and are surprised to discover on measuring them how great it is. Oh, how I love these solitudes And places silent as the night There where no thronging multitudes Disturb with noise their sweet delight!
Neil telegraphed to his father, asking him to go down to Stoneleigh and meet them on their arrival with the body. But the Hon. John was suffering with the gout, and only Anthony and Dorothy were there, when Neil and Flossie and Bessie came, the latter utterly exhausted and unable to sit up a moment after entering the house.
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