"But it is Matilda who is hurrying things forward in this railway fashion. No doubt she has the best right to arrange Muriel's affairs, she has been a mother to her; but the fact is, it is going to be a double wedding. Matilda herself and Muriel are to be married the same day; Considine has plucked up heart at last, proposed, and been accepted. He should have done it long ago, as I tell him. And now that the game is in Matilda's hands, she is more eager than the little girl of sixteen. She has had longer to wait, you will say, and that there are no fools like old fools. I know the way you men like to talk, pretending to be hard, and you as soft as the women--you, Ralph, at least, only your head is so full of business you do not give yourself leisure to think. "And, oh! Ralph, dear, I do wish you would come back to Canada and silence the scurrilous reports that are in circulation. Only show face, and the cowards and liars who invent stories about an absent man will be silenced; for well I know there is not a syllable of truth in the whole _farrago_. The city papers are detestable just now; and really, Ralph, you ought, for your son's and your wife's sake, as much as your own, to write your solicitors at once, and get them heavily fined for their abominable calumnies. Indifferent as you are to such things, you really cannot let that story pass which appeared in the papers the other day. It is getting copied into every paper in the Dominion, Gerald says, and he feels so sore about it; he won't show face in Montreal, he says, till it is set right. I mean, of course, the vile libel of that low Indian, Paul, which his counsel repeated to the magistrate, accusing you of having conspired to carry off and make away with your own first cousin--Mary Selby's child. I wish, dear Ralph, you would come back and face them out, the foul-tongued ruffians. That would shame them out of countenance and stop their mouths. The papers say there is a writ out against you. Come back, Ralph, give yourself up, and hurry on the trial. The sooner the truth is known the better. For all my confidence in you, I feel it painful to have the people's eyes fixed on me when I walk up the village to go to church, as if I were an evildoer. Think of it, Ralph, and come.