Yet this was so. Moved by curiosity, and a more subtle feeling still, Mrs. Temple had followed him upstairs, shortly after he had left the breakfast room. She sometimes--not often--went into his sitting-room if she had anything that she wished particularly to say to him, and something prompted her to go into it now. The door was very slightly ajar, and she pushed it open and entered the room, and in a moment her eyes fell on the open letter on the table. She made a step forward and looked at it. Then she read the words with which it commenced: "My dearest, dearest John." Her breath came fast, her heart beat quickly, and she put out her hand as if to take it up, but glancing to the open bedroom door she saw John Temple leaning on the balustrade of the ante-room balcony beyond, and her hand shrank back. But again she looked at the letter; looked at the address in Pembridge Terrace, which was neatly printed on the paper. She noted this in an instant, but as she did so John Temple turned his head, and Mrs. Temple quickly moved back, and left the room, without his having ever been conscious that she had been there. But she had made a discovery; a discovery which filled her heart with jealous anger. As she walked on to her room she decided in her own mind that it was the missing girl, May Churchill, who had addressed John Temple as "My dearest, dearest John." "Shameful!" she thought, bitterly; "absolutely shameful; and what a liar he is, but his uncle shall know--he shall bitterly repent the part he has played." She walked up and down her room in a state of the greatest excitement. It seemed to her as if John Temple had done her some personal wrong, which he certainly had not. She had allowed herself to be attracted by him--to fill the waste in her heart--but he had never for a moment forgotten she was his uncle's wife. He had pitied her in her grief about her dead boy, and his manner was always gentle and kindly to women, but he did not even admire her; she was too excitable, too uncertain in her temper, for his taste. "But I must bring it home to him," she now told herself; "it's no use striking until I can bring it home--I will send for young Henderson." She accordingly sat down at her desk and began a letter to Henderson. At first she thought of asking him to the Hall, but afterward remembered that this might look strange to her husband and John Temple. No, she must meet him somewhere about the country, and she paused, pen in hand, thinking where it should be. She decided in a few minutes, and then addressed the following letter to Henderson: