“In all this new trouble, Poictiers has been all that you’d expect him to be; a friend to tie to. He doesn’t lend me money; he simply tosses me his purse. I have his last dividend check in my pocket at this present moment, and I’m to cash it to-morrow morning to pay for the new engine. I suppose I needn’t say that I should have been out of the fight down here long ago if he hadn’t joined me and given me a checking account. He is pure gold, Elizabeth; and yet---- * * * * * “The gap represents a good half-hour, my dear cousin, in which I have been sitting here at this dinky little table in the hotel writing-room, trying to screw my courage to the sticking-place. What I have to tell you concerns four people, and you are one of the four. I’ve written you a lot about Richardia Birrell--she’s another one of the four--in the past few weeks, and I have been assuring myself all along that I have been telling you all there was to tell. “That isn’t strictly true, Elizabeth. There was a thing that I wouldn’t admit, even to myself; but I had to admit it three days ago when Poictiers told me that he had asked Richardia to be his wife. I knew then what Richardia had done to me, and for a bad half-hour I--well, I’m not going into details; it is enough to say that I’m not fit to be your door-mat, Betha, dear--nor Poictiers Carfax’s, for that matter. “What can I say for myself more than I have said a hundred times in the past? Nothing, I imagine; I’m simply hopeless where the eternal feminine is concerned. You’ve known it ever since we went to school together, and you’ve promised to marry me in spite of the knowledge. I shall not be a faithless husband, my dear--I know I shan’t be that; and this last and most humiliating lapse could never have amounted to anything, anyway, even if Poictiers had not slammed the door in my face. But it is your right to know about it; to know that for some few days or hours or minutes, as the case may be, I was daffy, foolish, a simpleton from the idiotic wards, with a slant toward depravity. “You see now what an incredible friend Poictiers is. I’ve never thought of him as a marrying man, and I could swear, even now, that he isn’t in love with Richardia--though I don’t quite see how any free man with live blood in him could help being. Let that go: Poictiers has killed my temptation for me. He has asked Richardia to marry him, and he and she are good enough for each other--which is the highest praise I can offer to either. Poictiers will get a wife who could make any man happy; and Richardia will be able to restore the Birrell fortunes, which, as you have doubtless gathered from my earlier letters, are pretty sadly in need of a rich marriage.