A Fair Fraud — page 269: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

258 A Fair Fraud ‘I must take my chance of that,’ Hester answer d gently. But she sighed, and som: times, for all her courage, it was difficult for her not to believe that her mother might not improbably Le right. For absence is the worst of all the evils which love has to contend against, and there were moments in her trying life when, worn out with her mother’s unrea:onableness and bad temper, the poor girl felt herself unable to look forward to the future with anything save a hopeless despair. Why should he be true to her? Her mother's gloomy foreb>dings found an echo in her own heart; and when she came to look the facts calmly in the face she could sce no reason why Kenneth should ever come back to her. He was in no way bound to do so; by her own doing and in her own hand- writing she hal insisted on leaving him free as air; he was not to write to her or seek to see her for six months, And if in six months’ time he had changed his mind, then he was to make no sign; he was simply to drop out of her life in silence and for ever. Often and often her heart quailed when she thought over these her own conditions. It would be so easy for him to change his mind, to reconsider the case. And in an absence GORMGIOO