“It’s the same in everything! Your house must be taken, not because it is convenient or that you like it, but because your wife can put a pretentious address on her card. It must be something to which you can tag Berkeley Square, or Belgravia. In a word, a wife is a mistake, and, what is worse, a mistake out of which there is no issue.” Thus reasoning and reflecting--now, speculating on what he should feel--now, imagining what “the world” would say--he again sat down, and once more read Over Mr. Walter’s last will and testament. CHAPTER VI. SOPHY’S LETTER. IN something over a week the post brought two letters for the fellow-travellers. Loyd’s was from his mother--a very homely affair, full of affection and love, and overflowing with those little details of domestic matters so dear to those who live in the small world of home and its attachments. Calvert’s was from his Cousin Sophy, much briefer, and very different in style. It ran thus: “Dear Henry--” “I used to be Harry,” muttered he. “Dear Henry,--It was not without surprise I saw your handwriting again. A letter from you is indeed an event at Rocksley. “The Miss Grainger, if her name be Adelaide (for there were two sisters) was our nursery governess long ago. Cary liked, I hated her. She left us to take charge of some one’s children--relatives of her own, I suspect--and though she made some move about coming to see us, and presenting ‘her charge,’ as she called it, there was no response to the suggestion, and it dropped. I never heard more of her. “As to any hopes of assistance from papa, I can scarcely speak encouragingly. Indeed, he made no inquiry as to the contents of your letter, and only remarked afterwards to Cary that he trusted the correspondence was not to continue. “Lastly, as to myself, I really am at a loss to see how my marriage can be a subject of joy or grief, of pleasure or pain, to you. We are as much separated from each other in all the relations of life, as we shall soon be by long miles of distance. Mr. Wentworth Graham is fully aware of the relations which once subsisted between us,--he has even read your letters--and it is at his instance I request that the tone of our former intimacy shall cease from this day, and that there may not again be any reference to the past between us. I am sure in this I am merely anticipating what your own sense of honourable propriety would dictate, and that I only express a sentiment your own judgment has already ratified. “Believe me to be, very sincerely yours, “Sophia Calvert.”