Shutting the door cautiously, that the snap and blaze might not betray him, he struck a wax match, warranted to burn a minute-and-a-half, and raised the lid of the desk. His unseen but wily coadjutor had guided him cunningly. In fingering a heap of envelopes in order to find one large enough for his purpose, he brought to light one addressed to “Mr. Frederic Chilton, Box 910, Philadelphia, Penn.” Upon the reverse was a small blot that had condemned it in Mabel's sight, as unfit to be sent to her most valued correspondent, and which she had not observed before writing the direction. Selecting another, she had thrown this back carelessly into the desk, meaning to burn it when it should be convenient, and forgotten all about it. The livid dints were deep and restless in Winston's nostrils, as seen by the light of the tiny taper he raised to extinguish, when his prize was secured. The devil supplied him with another crafty hint, as he was in the act of folding one edge of Frederic's letter that it might fit into the new cover. Why not strip off the letter entirely, that it might seem to have been opened, read, and then flung back upon the writer's hands with contumely? Half-way measures were unsafe and foolish. Stratagem, to be efficient, should be not only deft, but thorough; else it was bungling, not diplomacy. His hand did not shake in divesting the closely-written sheet of its wrapping, but in one respect his behavior was in consonance with the gentlemanly instincts he vaunted as a proof of pure old blood. He averted his eyes lest he should see a line the lover had penned to his mistress. The letter slipped smoothly into the quarters prepared for it--smoothly as Satan's mark usually goes on until his tool has made his damnation sure. “Well done?” said Diabolus. “That was a clever hit!” chimed in his assistant, complacently, after he had put the sealed envelope into his portfolio for safe-keeping, and burned the torn one he had removed. “Nobody but an idiot or a madman would persist in following a girl up after such a quietus.” He replied to Frederic's note to himself shortly and with disdain, using the third person throughout, and informing Mr. Chilton with unmistakable distinctness that Miss Aylett had offered no opposition whatever to her brother's will in this unfortunate affair. So far as he--Mr. Aylett--could judge, her views coincided exactly with his own. Mr. Chilton's letters and presents should be returned to him at an early day, and thus should be finished the closing chapter of a volume which ought never to have been begun. All this done to his mind, he set the door of his room ajar, and watched for Mabel's passage to hers.