The letter was not easy to him. When he had written before, they were engaged to be man and wife, and he remembered, with a pang, the feeling of dissatisfaction with which he had laid down her little missive from Bologna. It had seemed to him as if nothing in it went below the surface, unconscious as he chose to be that it was he who had kept her there, he who had chilled and disappointed her. Well, he was punished now, he thought gloomily, and the shy brown eyes seemed to be looking at him with sad pity. He had lost Phillis, and he had lost Hetherton. He knew his uncle, with all his foibles, was a just man, and fond of Phillis, so that he had little doubt that after his solemn assurance that he alone was to blame, he would provide liberally for Phillis, though not to the extent of making her his heiress. The estate might perhaps be reserved for Oliver Trent, if Jack kept silence. Jack was not sufficiently superior to mortal weaknesses to find that reflection pleasant. But it would have been easier to endure, or, at any rate, so he thought at this moment, if he could have shifted the cause of its doing on any shoulders but his own. He made a wry face as he acknowledged his own absolute folly. He would thankfully now have thrown away his old prospects of Hetherton for the hope of winning Phillis, but it was far from soothing to remember that he had flung both to the winds. First he had listened too easily, then repented too hastily, then had found out too late what he might have known from the very first. It seemed to him as if he could never reproach another man with folly. And he had a distracting consciousness as he wrote-- stopping every now and then, jumping up to poke the fire or do something which might by some good chance assist his expressions--that although it was Phillis, and nobody but Phillis, who had sent him on his errand, she would believe nothing but that Bice's deliverance had been the actual spur. It made it, as has been said, difficult for him to write. He did not like to paint Trent's conduct in too black colours, lest it might seem it was his object to effect a break between him and Bice. Yet it was quite clear to him that the break ought to be effected, if only it could be done by other hands than his, and he grew vexed that he had not assured himself that Clive would speak out and to the purpose. His sentences read coldly, because he wished to treat all that part, which was his only excuse for writing, in a business-like manner. Phillis, thinking to shield him, and feeling sure it would be broken, had not told him of the actual tie existing between Bice and Oliver Trent, and he guarded his words about them both with an evident restraint. It was a great relief to him when at last his letter was finished and placed in the letter-bag, and then he half smiled to find that his thoughts had wandered to a calculation of the number of days that must pass before he would receive an answer.