These applications were as painful to Mr. Desmond as such applications must always be to a man who has power to feel the extent of human want and wretchedness around and about him, without the power to relieve it. He read the piteous letters with a sigh, and passed them over to his sub-editor, who answered every appeal with the same polite formula. Laurence Desmond was not a hard man, however, and to an appeal that came from an old friend or fellow-worker he never turned a deaf ear. Such an appeal came to him one dull, wintry morning after his return from the ducal château in Scotland. Among his letters there was a very painful one from Mrs. Jerningham, with the usual jealous murmurs, the oft-repeated complaints of neglect. This he read with a thoughtful brow, and laid aside with a sigh so heavy as to be almost a groan. “I am tired of protestation and justification,” he said to himself; “there must be an end of these letters. If she doubts my truth because I spend half a dozen days without going to her, she can have little power to appreciate the unselfishness of my regard in the three long years in which I have made myself her slave. There must come an end to a bondage that is intolerable to me, and only a source of unhappiness to her.” The rest of Mr. Desmond’s letters, with one exception, were on business connected with his journal. This one exception was a letter addressed in a hand that was very familiar to him. “My old coach, Tristram Alford!” he cried, as he tore open the envelope. “I wonder how the poor fellow has been getting on since the old days at Henley, when Max Waldon, Frank Lawsley, and I were there with our boat, reading for ‘Greats.’ I suppose he has been writing a book, or doing a translation of a Greek tragedy, and wants me to give him a lift. It’s a long time since I’ve heard anything of him.” This was the tutor’s letter:-- “MY DEAR DESMOND,--If I had not already tested and proved the goodness of your heart when I appealed to you some three or four years since for a loan,--which I then hoped would have been of a temporary character, but which, I regret to remember, has not yet been liquidated,--I should not now venture to address you as a suppliant. “The favour which I am now about to ask is not of a pecuniary kind, and it is a favour which will be very easy for you to grant. You remember my little girl Lucy, who was so fond of your dogs and boats, and who used to sit listening with open eyes and mouth when we were construing _Sophocles_. The little rogue had an innate love of the drama, and performed the part of Electra with a metal tea-pot in a most affecting manner. Well, my dear boy, that inborn dramatic taste, which showed itself when the child was in pinafores, has grown with her growth; and when old enough to consider the question of getting her own living,--the generous-minded child being sensitively averse to remaining a burden to me,--she decided on becoming an actress.