"If he will only go away," she said feverishly, "I shall feel free to breathe again: free of one horrible burden at all events! and he spoke very definitely of going to-night. Now I am sure," she said the next moment, "he can know nothing. If he had, he _must_ have let me realize this in some way or other. We have been so much together. I have wanted to be with him as much as I could, just on purpose to watch him! And if he does not know now, why should he ever know? If I could only set the matter right unknown to him!" She gave a long sigh, and shut her eyes for a moment. "What a lot of things there are to set right! What a fearful lot!"... She sat with her eyes closed for a little while, and then she roused herself and began to draw off her long gloves slowly. As she did so a little scrap of paper fell from the palm of one. She picked it up. It had scribbled on it the amount she had lost that night at bridge. This swept her thoughts sharply into the old, the well-worn channel. "Forty-seven pounds!" she said to herself. "Oh, Lord, what a fool I am! Why can't I play like other people do? I shall have to settle this to-morrow. Ena will be round here with the milk to get her money. How I hate losing to women." She got up with a jerk, and her letters were scattered on the ground. As she stooped and picked them up she glanced at the writing on each. One was from Agnes Brenton, the others looked like bills, with the exception of one that was addressed in a handwriting she knew and feared only too well. It was a letter from Colonel Lancing, her husband's father. Camilla bit her lip sharply and trembled. She flung off her beautiful theatre wrap, and stood deliberating with the letter unopened in her hand. Then with a sort of grim shadow on her face she took the plunge, and tore open the envelope. The very look of the letter, with its straight, hard characters had an accusing tone about it. It started without any courteous beginning. It was a horrible letter for Camilla Lancing to read. Clearly, coldly, uncompromisingly the writer put before her his knowledge of all those many facts that she had worked so hard to keep concealed from him. Her life of debt and difficulty, her extravagances, her gambling, her friends, and her follies were denounced in hard, deliberate terms. She was judged without mercy, without a chance of defence; and her sentence was written in the same hard, merciless way. Colonel Lancing announced that the allowance he had made her since his son's death was taken from her; her independence was to cease at once.