“La, no, sir! how could I?” said Polly, with a face of brass. Sir Charles thought this very odd, and felt a little uneasy about it. All to Portman Square he puzzled over it; and at last he was driven to the conclusion that Miss Somerset had been weak enough to tell some person, male or female, of the coming interview, and so somebody had called there--doubtless to ask him a favor. At five o'clock he reached Portman Square, and was about to enter, as a matter of course; but the footman stopped him. “I beg pardon, Sir Charles,” said the man, looking pale and agitated; “but I have strict orders. My young lady is very ill.” “Ill! Let me go to her this instant.” “I daren't, Sir Charles, I daren't. I know you are a gentleman; pray don't lose me my place. You would never get to see her. We none of us know the rights, but there's something up. Sorry to say it, Sir Charles, but we have strict orders not to admit you. Haven't you the admiral's letter, sir?” “No; what letter?” “He has been after you, sir; and when he came back he sent Roger off to your house with a letter.” A cold chill began to run down Sir Charles Bassett. He hailed a passing hansom, and drove to his own house to get the admiral's letter; and as he went he asked himself, with chill misgivings, what on earth had happened. What had happened shall be told the reader precisely but briefly.. In the first place, Bella had opened the anonymous letter and read its contents, to which the reader is referred. There are people who pretend to despise anonymous letters. Pure delusion! they know they ought to, and so fancy they do; but they don't. The absence of a signature gives weight, if the letter is ably written and seems true. As for poor Bella Bruce, a dove's bosom is no more fit to rebuff a poisoned arrow than she was to combat that foulest and direst of all a miscreant's weapons, an anonymous letter. She, in her goodness and innocence, never dreamed that any person she did not know could possibly tell a lie to wound her. The letter fell on her like a cruel revelation from heaven. The blow was so savage that, at first, it stunned her. She sat pale and stupefied; but beneath the stupor were the rising throbs of coming agonies. After that horrible stupor her anguish grew and grew, till it found vent in a miserable cry, rising, and rising, and rising, in agony. “Mamma! mamma! mamma!” Yes; her mother had been dead these three years, and her father sat in the next room; yet, in her anguish, she cried to her mother--a cry the which, if your mother had heard, she would have expected Bella's to come to her even from the grave. Admiral Bruce heard this fearful cry--the living calling on the dead--and burst through the folding-doors in a moment, white as a ghost. He found his daughter writhing on the sofa, ghastly, and grinding in her hand the cursed paper that had poisoned her young life. “My child! my child!”