For example, one of the prisoner's male friends wrote inviting him to make a yacht voyage around the world. Another suggested an absence of six months on the Continent. A third recommended field-sports and fishing. The one object aimed at by all the writers was plainly to counsel a separation, more or less plausible and more or less complete, between the married pair.
The last letter read was addressed to the prisoner in a woman's handwriting, and was signed by a woman's Christian name only.
"Ah, my poor Eustace, what a cruel destiny is ours!" the letter began. "When I think of your life, sacrificed to that wretched woman, my heart bleeds for you. If we had been man and wife--if it had been my unutterable happiness to love and cherish the best, the dearest of men--what a paradise of our own we might have lived in! what delicious hours we might have known! But regret is vain; we are separated in this life--separated by ties which we both mourn, and yet which we must both respect. My Eustace, there is a world beyond this. There our souls will fly to meet each other, and mingle in one long heavenly embrace--in a rapture forbidden to us on earth. The misery described in your letter--oh, why, why did you marry her?--has wrung this confession of feeling from me. Let it comfort you, but let no other eyes see it. Burn my rashly written lines, and look (as I look) to the better life which you may yet share with your own "HELENA."
The reading of this outrageous letter provoked a question from the Bench. One of the Judges asked if the writer had attached any date or address to her letter.
In answer to this the Lord Advocate stated that neither the one nor the other appeared. The envelope showed that the letter had been posted in London. "We propose," the learned counsel continued, "to read certain passages from the prisoner's Diary, in which the name signed at the end of the letter occurs more than once; and we may possibly find other means of identifying the writer, to the satisfaction of your lordships, before the Trial is over."
The promised passages from my husband's private Diary were now read. The first extract related to a period of nearly a year before the date of Mrs. Eustace Macallan's death. It was expressed in these terms: "News, by this morning's post, which has quite overwhelmed me. Helena's husband died suddenly two days since of heart-disease. She is free--my beloved Helena is free! And I?