II.
I must pass over a long period now--I suppose I should have said I was
writing of a great many years ago, and come to the time, twenty years
later, when Paul came home from abroad. He had not been home all these
years, and neither had I been once in the south.
Janet, my poor Janet, was long since dead. She had died before she was
quite two years married. It was an additional pang to my grief that I
had never said good-bye to her at all; but no good-bye was better than
that awful one I had witnessed of Paul.
What was the precise explanation of it I never knew. It was easy to
divine that Janet had indeed been engaged to marry Paul, and had given
him up; but whether this was the result of some quarrel, or whether she
had deliberately done it, dazzled by the prospect of a union with an
earl's son, I cannot say. Anyhow, I am sure she quickly regretted her
determination. I am certain she loved only Paul. But the word had been
spoken, and whatever Vandeleur may have been, Paul was not a man to give
any woman a chance of trifling with him twice. So my poor Janet had to
reap what her folly had sown, as best she might.
Janet left one little child, a daughter, called Janet, after her; and
this child, becoming an orphan at an early age by the death, next, of
Stephen Vandeleur, was brought up with his family in Ireland.
She was in Scotland once when she was about fourteen, and I saw her, and
was not favourably impressed.
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