After staring at each other in shock for a few moments, the two stumble over to a bench at the station a sit, shaken to the core. Barney buries his face in his hands while Valancy stares straight ahead with only one thought in her mind: why isn't she dead? Dr. Trent had told her that any great shock or excitement would be fatal, and yet... she's just had a shock of the absolute worst kind and she's perfectly fine, other than the racing heart and wobbly knees that anyone would have after such an experience. Is it possible that Trent made a mistake? She glances at Barney's still form and imagines that he must be wondering something along the same lines:
Valancy shivered as if a cold wind had suddenly chilled her to the soul. She looked at Barney, hunched up beside her. His silence was very eloquent: Had the same thought occurred to him? Did he suddenly find himself confronted by the appalling suspicion that he was married, not for a few months or a year, but for good and all to a woman he did not love and who had foisted herself upon him by some trick or lie? Valancy turned sick before the horror of it. It could not be. It would be too cruel--too devilish. Dr. Trent couldn't have made a mistake. Impossible. He was one of the best heart specialists in Ontario. She was foolish--unnerved by the recent horror. She remembered some of the hideous spasms of pain she had had. There must be something serious the matter with her heart to account for them.
But she had not had any for nearly three months.
Dr. Trent doesn't recognise her right away, and she introduces herself as Valancy Snaith, formerly Valancy Stirling, reminding him of her visit the previous year. Now remembering, he says that his injured son has now completely recovered, compliments her on her obviously much improved health, and says that, as he told her at the time, her heart condition was not serious and has obviously cleared itself up. Valancy stares at him for a moment and then says that he told her in his letter that she had angina pectoris which was in its final stages and complicated by an aneurism, meaning that she only had about a year to live. Astounded, Dr. Trent says that he couldn't have told her that so Valancy hands him the envelope addressed to Miss Valancy Stirling in his handwriting. He unfolds the letter within, glances through its contents, and then looks up in horror. The letter- addressed to a Miss Sterling- was one he had written to an elderly patient, Jane Sterling of Port Lawrence who had been to see him the same day as Valancy. Addressing the envelopes at the train station, distraught over his injured son, Dr. Trent had obviously put the wrong letters in the wrong envelopes. What Valancy had assumed was a slight misspelling of her surname was actually someone else entirely.