"The devil you did!" ejaculated Ned. Vaguely all this interested him, made him forget himself. "What did she say?" Peter Ramsay got up and walked about the room. "What did she say? It is an odd thing, Blackborough, what different ideas people have about love. I used to think it was a kind of fever that would yield to strict diet, and a saline treatment. It isn't. At least something which has got mixed up in it may be so; but--now on the other hand your cousin, who is a sensible woman, mind you, seems to me somehow to have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. She thinks--oh! hang it all I can't go vivisecting what she thinks--it's bad enough to do it for oneself--but because she can't at nine-and-twenty feel the same--yes! I'll say it--purely physical attraction for me that she felt for that poor sick man at nineteen, she says that it is a desecration for any one even to speak of marriage to her. I often wish the good women of the world could be made to understand how purely evanescent that sort of thing is, for how little it counts in the aggregate sum of life. Here is Helen--Mrs. Tressilian--giving it first place, while other good women relegate it to the nethermost hell; and all the while they prate about love with a big L." "My dear Ramsay," remarked Ned, "I'll give you ten thousand a year to go about the country and preach your views--and I'll give you a thousand extra for every woman you convert to them." "Quite safe," assented Dr. Ramsay with a growl. "I should be lynched before my first quarter's salary was due." "Meanwhile you will stick to it--and manage?" "Oh! I'll manage all right. I have an A1 prescription for the febrile part of the disease--I--I should like to give it to you----" The red brown eyes looked into the blue ones. "Yes!" replied Ned coolly, "she has married the other fellow because, no doubt, love seemed to her to be the devil. You are about right, Ramsay. Women are _impayable_ in that connection. Good-bye." He tried to amuse himself in a thousand ways that afternoon, but they all failed, so he took to business the next day, and went back to New Park in the evening and drank another bottle of champagne and smoked still more cigarettes. The next day brought him a letter in an unknown hand. Was it a man's or a woman's, he wondered. A woman's surely, since the black-edged envelope smelt horribly of scent as he opened it. Aura Cruttenden! The signature gave him quite a shock. The idea of her using either black-edged paper or scent revolted him, but the letter was--passable. "Dear Ned," it ran, "I suppose I ought to call you Lord Blackborough, but I can't. I shall never forget you. You have taught me, I think, everything I know that's worth knowing. Perhaps ever so long age you and I were the same Am[oe]ba. What are we going to be in the end. That is the question. Don't--don't quarrel with us, please.--Yours, "Aura Cruttenden."