It was about a week after Mr. Jerningham made this remark, that Emily found a letter awaiting her on the table of her morning-room. The letter was addressed in her husband’s hand, sealed with her husband’s arms and cipher. It was his habit to write her little notes informing her of his movements when the pressing business of their useless existence separated them for a day or so; but he did not usually seal his letters. This letter was sealed: and there must have been something in the appearance of the document which startled Mrs. Jerningham, for she grew very pale, and her hand trembled as it tore open the envelope. The length of the letter was not calculated to alarm a woman who expected a marital lecture. “MY DEAR EMILY,--The tulip-wood cabinet in which I keep coins is exactly the same as that which you use for your letters. The keys are duplicates. I opened yours instead of my own this morning, in a fit of absence of mind, and saw some letters. I did not read them. The fact of their existence, their number, and the address they bear--which is not to any house of mine, is sufficiently suggestive. Be good enough to remain at home to-morrow. Mr. Halfont will call upon you in the course of the morning.--Truly yours, “H. J.” This was all. Mr. Halfont was the family lawyer, a person whose name was generally heard in connection with leases. Mrs. Jerningham looked at the two cabinets, one on each side of the fireplace. Yes, they were exactly alike. She had known that always, and might have guessed that the locks and keys were the same. But she had never thought on the subject; the apartment was so entirely her own sanctum; and Harold Jerningham possessed so many cabinets filled with coins and medallions, cameos and intaglios, which he never looked at, and which, after the feverish delight of bidding for them at Christie’s, were supremely indifferent to him. How, then, should she have foreseen the possibility of the accident that had happened? Was it altogether an accident? Emily took a key from a little casket on the table, and went to one of the cabinets--her own. She opened it, and seated herself in the chair before it--the chair in which Harold Jerningham had sat an hour ago, no doubt. The piece of furniture was half-cabinet, half-secrétaire; and it was here that Mrs. Jerningham was wont to fill in the blanks in those lithographed protestations of rapture or expressions of regret wherewith she accepted or declined the invitations of her acquaintance. It was here she wrote her letters, and it was here she kept the MSS. of those correspondents whose letters were worthy of preservation. They were in a row of pigeon-holes; and amongst those in the pigeon-hole marked D there was a packet tied with ribbon. That tendency to render a bundle of dangerous letters conspicuous by a circle of bright-hued ribbon is one of womanhood’s fatal weaknesses.