"Gone!" Mr. Gibbs was puzzled by the woman's tone. "Gone where? For a walk?" "No, sir, she's gone away. She's left this letter, sir, for you." The landlady thrust an envelope into his hand. It was addressed simply, "Thomas Gibbs, Esq." With the envelope in his hand, and an odd something clutching at his heart, he went into the empty sitting-room. He took the letter out of its enclosure, and this is what he read: "My own, own Tom,--You never were mine, and it is the last time I shall ever call you so. I am going back, I have only too good reason to fear, to the life from which you took me, because--_I am not your Nelly_." The words were doubly underlined, they were unmistakable, yet he had to read them over and over again before he was able to grasp their meaning. What did they mean? Had his darling suddenly gone mad? The written sheet swam before his eyes. It was with an effort he read on. "How you ever came to mistake me for her I cannot understand. The more I have thought of it, the stranger it has seemed. I suppose there must be a resemblance between us--between your Nelly and me. Though I expect the resemblance is more to the face in Mr. Bodenham's picture than it is to mine. I never did think the woman in Mr. Bodenham's picture was like me--though I was his model. I never could have been the original of your photograph of Nelly--it is not in the least like me. I think that you came to England with your heart and mind and eyes so full of Nelly, and so eager for a sight of her, that, in your great hunger of love, you grasped at the first chance resemblance you encountered. That is the only explanation I can think of, Tom, of how you can have mistaken me for her. "My part is easier to explain. It is quite true, as I told you, that I was starving when you came to me. I was so weak and faint, and sick at heart, that your sudden appearance and strange behaviour--in a perfect stranger, for you were a perfect stranger, Tom--drove from me the few senses I had left. When I recovered I found myself in the arms of a man who seemed to know me, and who spoke to me words of love--words which I had never heard from the lips of a man before. I sent you to buy me food. While you were gone I told myself--wickedly! I know, Tom it was wickedly!--what a chance had come at last, which would save me from the river, at least for a time, and I should be a fool to let it slip. I perceived that you were mistaking me for some one else. I resolved to allow you to continue under your misapprehension. I did not doubt that you would soon discover your mistake. What would happen then I did not pause to think. But events marched quicker than I, in that first moment of mad impulse, had bargained for. You never did discover your mistake. How that was, even now I do not understand. But you began to talk of marriage. That was a prospect I dared not face.