“Mabel has remained true and steadfast, even to the extent of disbelieving that you can be otherwise. From day to day, and from week to week, she has been looking for a message from you, if it were only one kind word. She has felt your wound, I make bold to say, a great deal more than you have done. She has taken more pride than you can have taken, in what she calls your ‘glory.’ She watches every morning for the man who goes for the letters, and every evening she waits and listens for a step that never comes. “If she could only make up her mind that you had quite forgotten her, I hope that she would try to think that you were not worth grieving for. But the worst of it is that she cannot bring herself to think any ill of you. And until she has it under your own hand that you are cruel and false to her, she only smiles at and despises those who think it possible. “We must put a stop to this state of things. It is not fair that any girl should be kept in the dark and deluded so; least of all such a girl as Mabel, so gentle, and true, and tender-hearted. Therefore I must beg you at once to write to my sister or to me, and to state honestly your intentions. If your intention is to desert my sister, I ask you, as a last favour, to do it as rudely and roughly as possible, so that her pride may be aroused and help her to overget the blow. But if you can give any honourable explanation of your conduct, no one will be more delighted, and beg your pardon more heartily and humbly, than your former friend, “GREGORY LOVEJOY.” CHAPTER XLVII. TRY TO THINK THE BEST OF ME. Lorraine set spurs to his horse as soon as he got to the end of this letter. It was high time for him to gallop away from the one idea,--the bitter knowledge that out of this he could not come with the conscience of a gentleman. He was right in fleeing from himself, as hard as ever he could go; for no Lorraine had been known ever to behave so shabbily. In the former days of rather low morality and high feudalism, many Lorraines might have taken fancies to pretty girls, and jilted them--but never as he had done; never approaching a pure maid as an equal, and pledging honour to her, and then dishonourably deserting her. “I am sure I know not what to do,” he cried, in a cold sweat, while his nag was in a very hot one. “Heaven knows who my true love is. I am almost sure that it must be Mabel; because when I think of her I get hot; and when I think of Claudia, I get cold.”