It is, alas! true in this world that
often the machinations of the wicked prosper.
By all the laws of morality Bertha Keys ought to have
come to condign punishment; she ought to have gone
under; she ought to have disappeared from society;
she ought to have been hooted and disliked wherever
she showed her face.
These things were by no means the
case, however. Bertha, playing a daring game,
once more achieved success.
By means of threatening to take her
work elsewhere she secured admirable terms for her
writing quite double those which had been
given to poor Florence. She lived in the best
rooms in Prince’s Mansions, and before a year
had quite expired she was engaged to Tom Franks.
He married her, and report whispers that they are
by no means a contented couple. It is known that
Franks is cowed, and at home at least obeys his wife.
Bertha rules with a rod of iron; but perhaps she is
not happy, and perhaps her true punishment for her
misdeeds has begun long ago.
Meanwhile Florence, released from
the dread of discovery, her conscience once more relieved
from its burden of misery, bloomed out into happiness,
and also into success.
Florence wrote weekly to Trevor, and
Trevor wrote to her, and his love for her grew as
the days and weeks went by. The couple had to
wait some time before they could really marry, but
during that time Florence learned some of the best
lessons in life. She was soon able to support
herself, for she turned out, contrary to her expectations,
a very excellent teacher. She avoided Tom Franks
and his wife, and could not bear to hear the name
of the Argonaut mentioned. For a time,
indeed, she took a dislike to all magazines, and only
read the special books which Mrs. Trevor indicated.
Kitty Sharston was also her best friend
during this time of humiliation and training, and
when the hour at last arrived when she was to join
Trevor, Kitty said to her father that she scarcely
knew her old friend, so courageous was the light that
shone in Florence’s eyes, and so happy and beaming
was her smile.
“I have gone down into the depths,”
she said to Kitty, on the day when she sailed for
Australia; “it is a very good thing sometimes
to see one’s self just down to the very bottom.
I have done that, and oh! I hope, I do hope that
I shall not fall again.”
As to Mrs. Trevor, she also had a last word with Kitty.
“There was a time, my dear,”
she said, “when knowing all that had happened
in the past, I was rather nervous as to what kind of
wife my dear son would have in Florence Aylmer, but
she is indeed now a daughter after my own heart brave,
steadfast, earnest.”