She got up abruptly and moved toward the door amid a chorus of protests, but she would not stay. At the threshold she turned to Miss Lavington. “Send your things down by the coach,” she said. “If you will let me I will be glad to drive you to the station myself to-morrow.” * * * * * When she got to her own study she found a letter thrust under the door with the familiar number of her room scrawled upon it in pencil. She picked it up, and as she looked at the address an expression of profound dislike and weariness came into her face. She opened the door slowly and put the letter down upon her desk, looking at it thoughtfully for a few moments. The handwriting was irresolute and boyish. She shivered slightly as she took the letter up with sudden resolution and tore it open. As she sat there and read it a look of hatred and disgust and utter hopelessness, strangely at variance with her usual brilliant expression, settled harshly upon her lovely, young face. “MY DEAREST WIFE,” it ran, “Forgive me! but this is about the only luxury I indulge in!--calling you in my letters what I dare not call you as yet before the world. “I am in a retrospective mood to-night, and feel like writing all sorts of things which I am afraid you won’t much like. Do you know I think that college is doing you harm! Don’t get angry at this, but sometimes I’m afraid you have repented of our boy and girl runaway match; but God knows I haven’t, and I’m glad I didn’t go to college but came out West and went to work for us both. I haven’t succeeded very brilliantly and may be the life has roughened me a bit, but I guess you can have the best there is out here, and I am still as devoted to you as in those old days of the summer before you went to that confounded (excuse me!) college, when you were just eighteen and I barely twenty-one. How interminably long four years seemed to wait then! But it was a case of getting married secretly and of waiting, or of not getting you at all. Sometimes I can hardly stand it, and I’d come back now and take you away, if I wasn’t so afraid of that blessed old father of yours--but I’m just as big a coward as I was three years ago, when I couldn’t screw up courage enough to go to him and tell him that he’d have to relinquish his pet scheme of sending his daughter to college, for she belonged to me. Whew! what a scene we’d have had! It was best to wait, I suppose.