Then, all at once, she remembered Yootha’s telling her long ago, one day when they had been talking in confidence about poor Stephen Lethbridge’s sad end, that her father had told her that strange-looking men and women had been in the habit of visiting Sir Stephen at Abbey Hall, in his place in Cumberland, shortly before his death. She wondered now, as she had wondered then, who those people could have been, and why they had visited Sir Stephen. But that, after all, she now reflected, was not of moment. What did matter was that her letters should be in the keeping of someone determined to do her an injury which would affect the whole of her future life if she refused to buy them back at the sum named in the letter she held in her hand. For a quarter of an hour or more she sat there, pondering deeply. She had received in the course of her life several hard knocks, and not once had her spirit failed her. It came back to her now that Stephen had more than once warned her to be more careful about what she put in writing; but then, she reflected, had he not himself been almost as reckless every time he wrote to her? Both were emotional by nature; both were highly imaginative, and they became carried away by their feelings when in correspondence with each other. That her anonymous correspondent had not exaggerated when he declared the letters to be “wholly compromising,” she well knew. Indeed, at the recollection of some of the violent love passages they contained she shuddered. What would become of her, she wondered feverishly, if those passages, written in her handwriting, or Sir Stephen’s, were to become public property? Oh, how mad she had been to write such things, she exclaimed aloud. The one drop of comfort in her bitterness was the reflection that Henry no longer lived, that he would never know. Henry! As she spoke her husband’s name a strange thought flashed in upon her. The mystery of his suicide had never been fathomed, nor had she ever succeeded in puzzling out even a possible solution to the problem, and now, all at once---- Her brain began to work with extraordinary rapidity. During his lifetime he had often read her curtain lectures which had bored her almost to distraction--he had never tired of impressing upon her his views regarding married women who carried on flirtations, and his opinion in general upon a wife’s duties to her husband. At first, when he had spoken thus, her conscience had cried aloud, and she had believed herself a hypocrite and not fit to be married to any honest man, seeing that she loved Stephen Lethbridge so madly.