Guy Earlscourt's Wife — page 222: what you’re looking at

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

¢ a | 210 On Christmas Eve. ate cases require desperate remedies. Against twu such men as Lord Montalien and Sir Vane Charteris you stand no chance. Your marriage with me will save you at least from a perhaps with him, and you may trust me to keep my oatn. CHAPTER IX. ON CHRISTMAS EVE. Over the fire, in her dingy lodgings, on the night preceding Christmas Eve, a bloodjess, attenuated shadow of a miser- able woman crouched. It was Alice, but Alice so changed that her own mother, had she by any chance entered, would have failed to recognize her. Alice, with every vestige of beauty, of youth, of health, gone—as utterly miserable a woman as the dull London light fell on. It was snowing without, and was cold. She had drawn a little shawl around her, and crouched with her hands out- stretched to the blaze. The few articles of summer clothing she had brought from home, in September last, were all she had yet. September last! only four short months! Heaven! what a lifetime! what an eternity of misery it looked to her! How she had reached home that night, after she left St. Gus James street, she never knew. Some one put her in a cab; s and when, after a day and a night of stupid, painless torpor, | she awoke to consciousness, she found herself again in her own poor room, and the landlady’s face looking half-compas- sionately,- half-impatiently at her. : “It was my luck to have my lodgers always a-falling sick S| on my hinds, and a-dying with their bills unpaid, like that Porter upstairs; and it does make a person hard, I confess,” Miss Young afterward owned, with remorse. And then memory and consciousness slowly came back, and she recollected all. She was not Frank’s wife—she was the lost creature they thought her at home, and Frank was voing to marry Paulina. No; he should never do that. She scarcely felt anger, or sorrow, or even pain now; beyond a certain point suffering ceases to be suffering, and becomes its own aneesthetic. She had reached that point—-she was past hope, past care, past heip. She would find out Paulina, tell her her story, save her from a like fate, and—die. Some such thoughts were in her mind as she erouched shiv- ering over the fire. The wintry twilight was fast filling the room. with its creeping darkness, when the doér suddenty opened, and, without e word of warniug, Lord Montalien stood before her. . oP ee et, eee = a men a — yn comicbooks.com in on Py lat me hai q did tho eve my you nig to hac tak me “ are one wil to Ali the shr hur her