Perhaps if the depths of that dark heart had been sounded, the depths beyond its own consciousness--the unvisited, unquestioned, profound--it would have been discovered that this man was so entirely accustomed to the devotion of the woman who loved him with a desperate though intelligent love, that even in her utmost despair and extreme outrage of wrong he felt assured she would do that which it was his will she should do. During all this mental review he had hardly bestowed a thought on George Dallas. He would be safe enough in the end, if the worst came to the worst. It had suited him to magnify the strength of the chain of coincidences, which looked like evidence, in discussing them with George, and he had magnified it; it suited him to diminish that strength in discussing them with himself, and he diminished it. A good deal of suffering and disgrace to all the "Felton-Dallas-Carruthers connection," as he insolently phrased it in his thoughts, must come to pass, of course, but no real danger. And if it were not so? Well, in that case, he really could not afford to care. When he had wanted money, Deane (he still thought of him by that name) had had to give way to that imperative need. Now he wanted safety, and Dallas must pay its price. There was something of the sublime of evil in this man's sovereign egotism. As he turned his mind away from the path it had been forced to tread to the end, he thought, "there is a touch of the whimsical in everything; in this it is the demi-semi-relationship between Harriet and these people. I suppose the sensitive lady of Poynings never heard of her stepfather Creswick's niece." A letter for Mr. Routh, a delicate, refined-looking letter, sealed with the daintiest of monograms, the thick board-like envelope containing a sheet of paper to match, on which only a few lines are scrawled. But as Stewart Routh reads them, his sinister dark eyes gleam with pleasure and triumph, and his handsome evil face is deeply flushed. "Bearer waits." Mr. Routh writes an answer to the letter, short but ardent, if any one had now been there to judge by the expression of' his face while he was writing it. He calls his clerk, who takes the letter to "bearer;" but that individual has been profiting by the interval to try the beer in a closely adjacent beer-shop, and the letter is laid upon a table in the passage leading to Stewart Routh's rooms, to await his return from the interesting investigation. Another letter for Mr. Routh, and this time also "bearer waits." Waits, too, in the passage, and sees the letter lying on the table, and has plenty of time to read the address before the experimenting commissionaire returns, has it handed to him, and trudges off with it. Presently the door at the end of the passage opens, and Routh comes out. "Who brought me a letter just now?" he says to the clerk, and then stops short, and turns to "bearer." "O, it's you, Jim, is it? Take this to Mrs. Routh."