P.S. I did not write four letters and tear three of them up, like you. I wrote one and corrected it, and here I have copied it out for you, hoping that in it I have made my meaning as clear to you as you made yours clear to me in your letter. CHAPTER XVII When the latter occurrences had shaken down in Aurora's mind, Gerald's letter, which she from time to time re-read, impressed her as a most gentle and reasonable production of his pen, while her own letter, preserved in the original scribble, appeared to her horrid, cutting, and uncalled for. But there was now nothing to do about it. The state of mind created in her by the whole episode prepared her to welcome with open arms any diversion, any event which would restore to her self-conceit a little vitality or lay on her heart a little balm; and so when, at the psychological moment, Doctor Thomas Bewick surprisingly turned up in Florence,--it may be remembered that he was Estelle's choice for Nell,--Nell fell on his neck quite literally, and gave him a full, sonorous kiss. "Tom! Tom!" she cried in delight, "how good it is to see you!" This happened in her formal drawing-room, whither she had gone on the servant's announcement that a gentleman from America, who had given no card or name, asked to see her. Their greeting over, she ran out into the hall, screaming joyfully: "Hat! Hat! Come down this minute! Hurry up! You'll never guess who's here!" In reply to which summons Estelle came hurrying down the stairs with an innocent, expectant air. "If it isn't Doctor Bewick!" she exclaimed, without giving herself away by one false inflection. "Why, Doctor Bewick, this is simply too awfully nice! What _are_ you doing over here? Who _would_ have expected to see _you_?" "Tom," said Aurora, "I was never in my life so glad to see any one. I didn't know how much I'd missed you till I saw you. You good old thing! You nice old boy! Aren't you a brick to have come! My soul, my soul! I didn't know till this minute how tired I am of foreigners and half-foreigners and quarter-foreigners and all their ways. I was hungry for home-folks and didn't know it. Now, please God, we'll have some talk where we know that when we use the same words we mean the same thing, and aren't wondering all the time what's really in the other's mind!" The man to whom this was said absorbed it with a face fixed in smiles of pleasure. He was a big blond man, disposed to corpulence, and looking somewhat like a fresh-faced, gigantic boy until his eye met yours and gave the note of a fine, mature intelligence, open on every side, and unobtrusively gathering in what it had no strong impulse afterward to give out again in any open form of self-expression.