"My lady was exceedingly unwell, and confined to her room. Miss Vavasour was somewhere in the Pleasance, but she wished to be sent for as soon as Sir Alan arrived." He had written the night before, to say he was coming. Wyverne walked on into the library without another word. For the moment he felt stupid and helpless, like a man just waking after an overdose of narcotics. He sat down, and began turning the letter over and over as if he were trying to guess at its contents. From its thickness it was evidently a long one--two or three note-sheets at least. A very few minutes, however, brought back his self-composure entirely, and he knew what he had to do. It was clear the letter could not be burnt unopened, this time. He drew his breath hard once, and set his teeth savagely; then he tore the envelope and began to read deliberately. Alan once said, when he happened to be discussing feminine ethics--"I can conceive women affecting one with any amount of pain or pleasure; but I don't think anything they could do would ever _surprise_ me." Rash words those--perhaps they deserved confutation; at any rate the speaker was thoroughly astounded now. He knew that no look or syllable had ever passed between himself and Nina Lenox that could be tortured into serious love-making; yet this letter of hers was precisely such as might have been written by a passionate, sinful woman, to the man for whom she had sacrificed enough to make her desertion almost a second crime. There was nothing of romance in it--nothing that the most indulgent judge could construe into Platonic affection--it was miserably _practical_ from end to end. No woman alive, reading such words addressed to her husband or her lover, could have doubted, for a second, what his relations with the writer had been, even if they were ended now. Griselda herself would have risen in revolt. It is needless to give even the heads of that delectable epistle. Mrs. Lenox acknowledged that she wrote in despite of Alan's repeated prohibition; but--_c'était plus fort qu'elle_, and all the rest of it. One point she especially insisted on. However _he_ might scorn her, surely he would not give _others_ the right to do so? He would burn the letter, she knew he would, without speaking of it, far less showing it to any human being; she suffered enough, without having her miserable weakness betrayed for the amusement of Miss Vavasour.