Gerald's letter startled her not a little. It was requisite that she should have time to think it over, and to consider in what way it might or might not interfere with her own special plans; so she slipped it quietly into her pocket, and said nothing to Kelvin that morning about it. Locked up in her own room she read the letter over and over again. After all, it was, perhaps, quite as well that this Mr. Warburton had discovered something as to the real facts of the case. Her cousin Matthew was so thin-skinned that, although he had agreed to the temporary concealment of certain facts, he evidently shrank from inflicting on Eleanor Lloyd the blow which ought to follow such concealment as a logical sequence. But should this Mr. Warburton come forward, the blow struck would be just the same, but her cousin would be spared its infliction. Eleanor Lloyd would still be deprived of name, wealth, and position, while a final sting should reach her from the hands of Olive herself, in the care she would take that, if not in one way then in another, Miss Lloyd should be duly enlightened as to the character and antecedents of the man to whom she had given her heart and promised her hand. Still it might be as well to temporise a little, to delay the climax for a week or two, if it were only that the bond of love which bound Miss Lloyd to Pomeroy might grow stronger with the lapse of time; for the more she learnt to love Pomeroy, the deeper would be the wound that a knowledge of his treachery could not fail to inflict. When Olive had once adopted this line of argument, it was easy for her to persuade herself that the wisest thing she could do would be to keep her own counsel for a little while as to Mr. Warburton's letter. In her cousin's present state of health such a communication would only serve to worry him, and could answer no practical end. Meanwhile, she would take upon herself to have the letter replied to, but in such a way that it would be impossible for her cousin to be offended with her when the time should come for him to be told all that she had done. Not being a person who was in the habit of acting on rash impulses, she kept the letter over-night, with the view of ascertaining whether the resolve which she had come to to-day would bear next morning's cold confirmation. Next morning changed nothing; and as soon as breakfast was over she went downstairs to her cousin's private office, and sent for Mr. Bowood, one of the clerks, and dictated to him that letter which we have already seen in the hands of Gerald. All that Olive wanted just now was a little delay, and this she succeeded in securing.