"
"Your lordship is not mistaken," said I, "her statement was so
extraordinary that I could not think of withholding it from you; she
told me, my lord, that you had a wife living at the time you married
me, and that she was that wife."
Lord Glenfallen became ashy pale, almost livid; he made two or three
efforts to clear his voice to speak, but in vain, and turning suddenly
from me, he walked to the window; the horror and dismay, which, in
the olden time, overwhelmed the woman of Endor, when her spells
unexpectedly conjured the dead into her presence, were but types
of what I felt, when thus presented with what appeared to be almost
unequivocal evidence of the guilt, whose existence I had before so
strongly doubted. There was a silence of some moments, during which it
were hard to conjecture whether I or my companion suffered most. Lord
Glenfallen soon recovered his self command; he returned to the table,
again sat down and said--
"What you have told me has so astonished me, has unfolded such a
tissue of motiveless guilt, and in a quarter from which I had
so little reason to look for ingratitude or treachery, that your
announcement almost deprived me of speech; the person in question,
however, has one excuse, her mind is, as I told you before, unsettled.
You should have remembered that, and hesitated to receive as
unexceptionable evidence against the honour of your husband, the
ravings of a lunatic.
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