your honour’s sake, don’t leave me,--Your broken-hearted NELL.’ So the poor girl wrote, as other poor, forsaken wretches have written before her, thinking to move the heart of a man who was already tired of her. As soon hope to move the heart of a stone as that of a lover hot on a new fancy. Her letter reached him, as we have seen, when the step she deprecated was taken beyond remedy, but it stirred his sense of having committed an injustice if it could not requicken his burnt-out flame. He did not know how to answer it. He had nothing to say in defence of himself, or his broken promises. So, like many a man in similar circumstances, he shirked his duty, and seized the first opportunity that presented itself of putting it on the shoulders of someone else. Since Sterndale had failed in his commission, the newspaper must convey to his cast-off mistress the news she refused to believe. So he posted the little sheet of paper printed for the edification of the British residents in Malta, to her address, and transcribed it in his own hand. She couldn’t make any mistake about _that_, he said to himself, as he returned to the agreeable task of making love to his countess. But the incident did not increase the flavour of his courtship. There is a sense called Memory that has on occasions an inconveniently loud voice and not the slightest scruple in making itself heard, when least required. The Earl of Ilfracombe had yet to learn if the charms of his newly-wedded wife were sufficiently powerful to have made it worth his while, in order to possess them, to have invoked the demon of Memory to dog his footsteps for the remainder of his life. But for the nonce he put it away from him as an unclean thing. Nora, Countess of Ilfracombe, reigned triumphant, and Nell Llewellyn, disgraced and disherited, was ordered to ‘move on,’ and find herself another home! Meanwhile, she awaited her lover’s answer in his own house. She refused to ‘move on’ until she received it.