'I have had trouble enough to get on
alone,' he grumbled. 'What will it be now? To burden myself with
a penniless wife! What egregious folly! And yet I couldn't have
acted differently--I was compelled to do it.' Why had he been
compelled to do it? why had he not acted differently?--that was
what I vainly puzzled my brain to explain. However, his gloomy
fears of poverty were not realized. A delightful surprise awaited
him at New York. A relative had recently died, leaving him a
legacy of fifty thousand dollars--a small fortune. I hoped that
he would now cease his constant complaints, but he seemed even
more displeased than before. 'Such is the irony of fate,' he
repeated again and again. 'With this money, I might easily have
married a wife worth a hundred thousand dollars, and then I should
be rich at last!' After that, I had good reason to expect that I
should soon be forsaken--but no, shortly after our arrival, he
married me. Had he done so out of respect for his word? I
believed so. But, alas! this marriage was the result of
calculation, like everything else he did.
"We were living in New York, when one evening he came home,
looking very pale and agitated. He had a French newspaper in his
hand. 'Read this,' he said, handing it to me. I took the paper
as he bade me, and read that my brother had not been killed, that
he was improving, and that his recovery was now certain.
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