‘It could not say anything,’ she retorted, with the boldness of despair; ‘there would be nothing for it to say. There is no harm in those letters. I should not mind if my husband read them to-morrow.’ ‘Wouldn’t you?’ said Jack Portland, with open eyes. ‘Then I’ll show them to him before he is twelve hours older.’ ‘No, no,’ said Nora quickly, ‘you would not do so mean an act, surely. You must have some instincts of a gentleman left in you. Remember under what circumstances they were written, and that I thought at the time I loved you.’ ‘I suppose you did,’ replied Mr Portland; ‘but they are delicious reading all the same. I read passages from them once to a select party of my men friends, and they said they would never have guessed they were the productions of a young lady. They voted they would have been warm even from a barmaid.’ ‘You did not! You cannot have been such a blackguard!’ exclaimed Lady Ilfracombe so shrilly, that he laid his hand upon her arms to caution her she might be overheard. ‘You have promised to give me those letters back, over and over again, and you have not kept your word. I will wait no longer, but have them at once. I insist upon it. Do you hear me? I will stand this treatment from you no longer.’ ‘Oh, I hear, fast enough, and I’m very much afraid that everybody else in the house, including Lord Ilfracombe, will hear also, if your ladyship is not a little more guarded.’ ‘But you promised--you _promised_,’ she continued vehemently, ‘and now you threaten to break your promise. You are no gentleman, Mr Portland. The lowest man on earth would degrade himself by such vile conduct.’ ‘I daresay,’ he answered coolly; ‘perhaps he would. But your behaviour is enough to make a saint forget his natural instincts. You remind me that I promised to return your letters. I know I did, and if you had treated me decently since coming here, I might have kept my promise. But I won’t give them to you now. I will only sell them.’ ‘What can you possibly mean?’ exclaimed the countess. ‘Am I to buy back my own letters? Well, I will. What price do you ask for them?’ She was standing in the oriel window of the drawing-room, most becomingly dressed in a gown of brown velvet, that seemed to match her eyes and set off the pearly whiteness of her skin, and as she put the above question she curled her upper lip and threw such an air of disdain into her expression that she looked more charming than usual. ‘Don’t look like that,’ said Portland, coming nearer to her, ‘or you will aggravate me to kiss you.’ The indignant blood rushed in a flood of crimson to Nora’s face and forehead, until it nearly forced tears from her eyes. ‘How dare you! How dare you!’ she panted, as she retreated as far as she could from him. ‘How dare I?’ he repeated. ‘That wasn’t the way your ladyship used to receive the same proposition when we sat together under the shade of the orange-trees in Malta a couple of years ago. Was it now?’