She gazed at the packet again, conscious that her fingers were faltering. How mean, low, hateful to read letters that had not been meant for others' eyes! And what purpose would be served by her reading them? She needed no further proof of the intrigue that had been carried on in the shelter of her own credulity and simplicity. Besides, she could divine what passionate vows of love were written herein, and to pry into them would be to renew her tortures beyond human endurance. She feared and turned away from them as from a furnace heated seven times hot. The packet dropped amid the masses of papers that encumbered the desk. Her tears came anew, and she gave them full vent; a storm of hysteric sobbing shook her convulsively. When eventually the attack had spent itself, she sat there listlessly, without the force to stir hand or foot. But her brain was working feverishly, definitely recognising that her life was spoilt. She had made her great cry of revolt in this mad dash and underhanded search; better perhaps to have made it in the silent depths of her heart! Ah, God, it was bitter, it was cruel! But what had she expected? Had she not known from the beginning that she ought never to accept one so far above her?--that she was not the ideal his heart would crave for, but that, at the best, a deep secret dissatisfaction would rankle in him all his life? Had she not steadily seen this, while yet a shred of sanity remained to her? But it had all happened in spite of herself; she had been stricken with blindness, and her clear-seeing mind had been possessed with inexplicable folly. She--Alice Robinson!--and the thought made her laugh out aloud--had wholly believed that this man sincerely loved her! She laughed again and again, seized suddenly by the pitifully comic spectacle she presented to herself--Alice Robinson, shy, awkward, devoid of all the graces, lacking _savoir-faire_, neglected not only by men, but even by her own sex: Alice Robinson, the granddaughter of a carpenter, seriously beloved by an aristocrat with all the graces and culture, an artist, moreover, for whom beauty was always the primal appeal! She--Alice Robinson--had been under this wondrous delusion! Was there anything more ridiculous since men and women were? Her laughter could not be repressed, but it rang out through the studio weirdly, with a strange note of hardness and bitterness, and somehow it echoed and re-echoed through all the house, coming back to her mockingly from the empty rooms beneath her.