Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 82: what you’re looking at

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

872 gentle expression—all were just the same. Only his eyes were different. His neutral- tinted eyes were terrible in a quiet way. They were the eyes of a man who has died while he is still alive. ‘“T don’t know what to say to you,” he began. ‘“Say it, please,” said Midge. ‘ Some- thing has happened. We can’t be married to-day.” ‘“We can’t be married to-day. I don’t suppose we shall ever be married, Midge. ' I will tell you what has happened. [ sup- pose I ought to be grateful that it happened this morning—before we went through the ceremony. But it is to be wished that it had happened before—last year; any time but to-day. There is something I have kept from you, Midge. It was wrong of me. It is always wrong to conceal things. In this case it was criminal. I have been mar- ried before.” : ‘““Oh!” said Midge in a hushed voice, guessing how her deliverance had come. ‘““T have believed my wife dead for ten years,” Sir John went on. “ Until yester- day. I had a wireless from a ship, about ten o’clock iast night, signed with my wife’s name. It announced that she was arriving this morning. At nine o’clock she came to my house. Last night I was too dazed to communicate with you, Midge. I hoped fatuously that there might be some mistake —up to the very last moment I hoped it.” “ But there isn’t,” Midge put in. Her voice was all gentleness because of what she saw in his eyes. “No, there isn’t. My wife is alive. She has traveled all the way from England to find me, because she saw in a newspaper that I was being married. No date was given, and she could not find out in England. She did not know that I had a house in Richmond. She went to my busi- ness address in London, but through some mistake she was told I was still traveling in China and they did not know the date of my marriage. She would take no risk, so she booked her passage in the hopes of being able to stop me. She was just in time.” ‘““ How strange!’’ said Midge. “Would you care to hear the story?” ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. “Of course I would.” ‘We were young when we married. My wife, as a matter of fact, is three years older than I am. She was a very clever girl, with a great deal of character. From the first we did not get on. I won’t go into that, if you don’t mind. I was more to blame than she. I see that now. J did not understand women then—not at all. I was too much taken up with my business. My wife and I parted—quite by mutual agreement. We parted good friends. She would not take any money from me. She was self-reliant and full of brains. A lit- tle while afterward she wrote to me that she was going to New Zealand. “On the very night of her arrival the hotel she stayed in caught fire, and there were some casualties. Her name was among them. I read of her cruel death in the paper. It was a mistake, of course; and the trouble was that she did not know she had been reported as dead. After a time she made her way to Australia, and start- ed a girls’ school, which is now the biggest and most important in Sydney—in the whole of Australia. She reverted to her maiden name, and is known as Miss Chal- mers. She had come back to England for the first time to take a holiday when she read about my forthcoming marriage. The rest I have told you.”’ ‘She is not to blame,” said Midge in rather a vague voice. ‘““ No; nobody is to blame.” Midge felt as if she were dreaming a perfectly sensible but unnatural dream. A schoolmistress three years older than Sir John—a woman of forty-three—his wife! A woman old enough to be her mother! She felt suddenly choking with nervous laughter. A schoolmistress—such a fitting wife for the matter-of-fact Sir John! So much more fitting than she was. Mists formed before her eyes, and through them she saw a vision—a figure on a snow white horse dashing toward her in-a wild moun- tain country and with a shot laying a man senseless at her feet. And Sir John, and a wife who kept the largest girls’ school in Australia! “There is nothing to be done,” Midge ventured. She had to say something. comicbooks CO