Her Faithful Knight — page 200: what you’re looking at

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

196 The Truth at Last. before I left the company on learning of my father’s fatal illness I had wearied of her, and I have the strongest pos- sible wish and determination never to see her again. It was not my fault that she loved me so much and that she cannot forget me. I will do my best to help you to pro- vide for her somewhere, though, of course, that mar- riage settlement will be waste paper until my brother has — the decency to die; but she has passed out of my life once and for all, and so far as I am concerned, the past doesn’t exist. Life is all the future—a future with you.” He seemed to have talked himself into a state of entire calmness and self-control, and even to look more or less happy and pleased with himself, as a man who, in the face of great difficulties, has attained a much-desired object. “So now,” he went on again after a pause, “that, like a good husband, I have made a clean breast of everything, you will begin to understand me better. As I have al- lowed nothing to stop me in my determination to win you, so I shall stop at nothing in my resolve to keep you. The dead past must bury its dead; you are my wife—that is enough for me.” “You forget,” she said at last, in sharp, metallic tones, “one important point in your vile, mad schemes. I am nothing more to you, thank heaven! than any stranger in the street, for your wife, Millie Clements, is alive.” “My wife, Millie Clements, died in New York just three months ago. You can have convincing legal proof on that point. There is no woman alive who can dispute your right to call yourself my wife, the Hon. Mrs. Darcy Der- rick.”’ Eomichbooks (E(0)