Next day, half tipsy and not knowing what I did,
I went through the form of marriage with you, and a few days
afterwards my mother returned, observed that we were intimate, and
dismissed you. You went without a word as to our marriage, which we
both looked on a farce, and for years I lost sight of you. Fifteen
years afterwards, when I had almost forgotten this adventure of my
youth, I became acquainted with a young lady with whom I fell in love,
and whose fortune, though not large, was enough to help me
considerably in my profession as a country lawyer, in which I was
doing well. I thought that you were dead, or that if you lived, the
fact of my having made the false declaration of age and locality would
be enough to invalidate the marriage, as would certainly have been the
case if I had also made a false declaration of names; and my impulses
and interests prompting me to take the risk, I married that lady. Then
it was that you hunted me down, and then for the first time I did what
I ought to have done before, and took the best legal opinions as to
the validity of the former marriage, which, to my horror, I found was
undoubtedly a binding one. You also took opinions and came to the same
conclusion. Since then the history has been a simple one.
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