She was sure that the Pasmers wished to have the affair on again, and part of her fascination with a girl whom she neither liked nor approved was her belief that Alice's health had broken under the strain of her regrets and her despair. She did not get better from the change of air; she grew more listless and languid, and more dependent upon Mrs. Brinkley's chary sympathy. The older woman asked herself again and again what made the girl cling to her? Was she going to ask her finally to intercede with Dan? or was it really a despairing atonement to him, the most disagreeable sacrifice she could offer, as Mr. Brinkley had stupidly suggested? She believed that Alice's selfishness and morbid sentiment were equal to either. Brinkley generally took the girl's part against his wife, and in a heavy jocose way tried to cheer her up. He did little things for her; fetched and carried chairs and cushions and rugs, and gave his attentions the air of pleasantries. One of his offices was to get the ladies' letters for them in the evening, and one night he came in beaming with a letter for each of them where they sat together in the parlour. He distributed them into their laps. “Hello! I've made a mistake,” he said, putting down his head to take back the letter he had dropped in Miss Pasmer's lap. “I've given you my wife's letter.” The girl glanced at it, gave a moaning kind of cry, and fell beak in her chair, hiding her face in her hands. Mrs. Brinkley, possessed herself of the other letter, and, though past the age when ladies wish to kill their husbands for their stupidity, she gave Brinkley a look of massacre which mystified even more than it murdered his innocence. He had to learn later from his wife's more elicit fury what the women had all known instantly. He showed his usefulness in gathering Alice up and getting her to her mother's room. “Oh, Mrs. Brinkley,” implored Mrs. Pasmer, following her to the door, “is Mr. Mavering coming here?” “I don't know--I can't say--I haven't read the letter yet.” “Oh, do let me know when you've read it, won't you? I don't know what we shall do.” Mrs. Brinkley read the letter in her own room. “You go down,” she said to her husband, with unabated ferocity; “and telegraph Dan Mavering at Wormley's not to came. Say we're going away at once.” Then she sent Mrs. Pasmer a slip of paper on which she had written, “Not coming.” It has been the experience of every one to have some alien concern come into his life and torment him with more anxiety than any affair of his own. This is, perhaps, a hint from the infinite sympathy which feels for us all that none of us can hope to free himself from the troubles of others, that we are each bound to each by ties which, for the most part, we cannot perceive, but which, at the moment their stress comes, we cannot break.