And he jerked his thumb over his shoulder. John Arniston could meet that argument. "You can feel it," he said; "try if there is anything in it, coin or jewels--you could tell, couldn't you?" The man laughed. "Might be notes, sir, like them in your hand--couldn't do it, indeed, sir." The devil leaped in the hot Scots blood of John Arniston. He caught the kneeling servant of Her Majesty's noblest monopoly by the throat, as he paused smiling with the door of the pillar-box open and the light of the street-lamp falling on the single letter which lay within. The clutch was no light one, and the man's life gurgled in his throat. John Arniston snatched the letter, glanced once at the address. It was his own. There was, indeed, no other. Hurriedly he thrust the four notes into the hand of the half-choked postman. Then he turned and ran, for the windows of many tall houses were spying upon him. He dived here and there among archways and passages, manoeuvred through the purlieus of the market, and so back into the offices of his paper. "And where is that _Dictionary of National Biography_?" asked John Arniston of the boy. The precious letter for which he had risked penal servitude and the cat in the prisons of his country for robbery of the Imperial mails (accompanied with violence), was blazing on the fire. Then, with professional readiness, John Arniston wrote a column and a half upon the modern lessons to be drawn from the fact that Queen Anne was dead. It was off-day at the paper, Parliament was not sitting, and the columns opposite the publishers' advertisements needed filling, or these gentlemen would grumble. The paper had a genuine, if somewhat spasmodic, attachment to letters. And from this John Arniston derived a considerable part of his income. When he went back to his room he found that his landlady had been in attending to the fire. She had also lifted the fallen Bible, on which he could now look with some complacency--so strange a thing is the conscience. On the worn hair covering of the old Bible lay a letter. It was from Miriam--a letter written as hastily as his own had been, with pitiful tremblings, and watered with tears. It told him, through a maze of burning love, among other things that she had been a wicked woman to listen to his words--and that while her husband lived she must never see him again. In time, doubtless, he would find some one worthier, some one who would not wreck his life, as for one mad half-hour his despairing Miriam had been willing to do. Finally, he would forgive her and forget her. But she was his own--he was to remember that.