‘All men are not philosophers,’ Gaston Arbuthnot made reply. ‘I have learnt--tolerably dear the lesson cost me--not only to exist in a stormy atmosphere, but to flourish there.’ And this is what Dinah wrote, not troubling herself over possible faults of Syntax, not making a fair copy in the slanting pointed handwriting to which, after much labour, she had tediously attained. This is what Dinah wrote, straight out from her heart-- ‘Florence, November 15. ‘MY DEAR MISS BARTRAND, ‘I have just found, _with shame and remorse_, that I did you grievous wrong, last July twelvemonth. You were the kindest friend, save Geff, that ever I met, and I repaid you, little meaning it, with treachery. Perhaps when you _see the enclosed_ you will guess what bitter confession I have got to make. ‘Dear Miss Bartrand--I found your envelope on the mantelpiece of our parlour at Miller’s Hotel, and I committed the meanest action of my life. I broke it open--and because I was blind with selfish trouble, and thought of my own suffering before all things, I kept the letter. I have had it in my possession till this hour. ‘It would be poor excuse to say I mistook the _person_ it was meant for, as well as the _hand_ that wrote it. It would be cowardice to say my heart was too hot, too miserable to reason. I sinned, and if my sin has stood between my best friends and happiness, my punishment will last me my life. ‘Unless I make too bold, may I hope, some future time, you will let Geoffrey read what I now write? Ask him to think of July the 1st, the day I went with him to Guernsey hospital. It was on that day, a quarter of an hour after Geoffrey left me, at the sight of _some one he will remember_, that I found your letter. ‘Dear Miss Bartrand, I am the penitent and humble well-wisher of your happiness, ‘DINAH.’ The letter was directed to Tintajeux Manoir, Guernsey, and posted by the writer’s hand on the night of November 15. A sharp Italian night, with the swollen Arno swirling, the moonlight lying in ebon and ivory patterns along the Florentine streets, with only one person--so it seemed to Dinah’s beating heart--abroad in the sleeping city. At the same hour Marjorie’s eager eyes looked forth, through rain and fog, through the blurred obscurity of a Great Eastern carriage window, upon the lamps of Cambridge. CHAPTER XLVIII HAPPINESS Madame Pouchée’s house, the goal of the girl’s journey, belonged to history; a thatched, lozenge-windowed structure, of which the pargeted gables, the black oak joints, and plaster panels abutted, with pathetically incongruous air, as of some aged spinster at a ball, on one of the brisk, modern thoroughfares of the town.