The Perversity of Human Nature by Ada Cambridge

Thus was the difficulty solved--very fortunately for everybody, except for the poor innocent one who paid the penalty for the guilty. To the credit of our heroine, and of human nature in general, let it be said that she was sorry enough for it. If the event had not set herself and Robert free to resume their interrupted wedded life, but had been an altogether immitigable disaster, she could not have been more prostrated by it. Indeed, she suffered so much that even Uncle Stephen felt that justice was done, and that his services were not required to bring the sense of her sin home to her. While the gossips and scandal- mongers were tearing her character to pieces, while the Penrose connection were raging over the fate of their relative, while Robert was going through the fires of public criticism and curiosity, the doer of all the mischief lay ill in her bed at the Esplanade Hotel, and at one point it looked rather as if she might die too. I am sure she would have felt it a great satisfaction to have done so, when her agonising repentance and remorse were fresh.

But the reader quite well understands that we are dealing, not with the supernaturally perfect creatures who usually, in the character of hero and heroine, move through the pages of fiction, but with beings like ourselves, who (as, alas, we know) are very, very human. And he will not be surprised to learn that the time came when Lexie and Robert both felt (though, of course, they did not own to it) that, given a misfortune for which there was no remedy, things had happened for the best.