He took the packet to a distant window, and there began his task. The letters were long--such clever, gossiping, semi-sentimental letters as a man writes to a lady with whom he is _aux petits soins_, without ulterior motive of any kind, for the mere pleasure involved in opening his mind and heart to a charming, sympathetic creature, whom he holds it better for himself “to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.” Such letters are little more than the vehicles by which a man lets off the poetic gases of his brain, the herbals wherein he preserves the rarer flowers of his mind. Into such letters a man can pour all his caprices of fancy, all his audacities of thought; and as he writes, his mind is divided between tenderness for the dear recipient of his outpourings and a lurking consciousness that his letters will adorn his biography, and hold their place in polite literature, when the hand that runs along the paper to-day has mouldered in a coffin. In such letters every writer appears at his best. In the present he is writing for only one indulgent critic; in the future he fancies himself revealed to posterity with an audacious freedom forbidden by the natural reserve of the man who knows he will have to read a hundred and twenty reviews of his book. Mr. Jerningham read Laurence Desmond’s letters very patiently. He smiled faintly now and then, in polite recognition of some little playful flight of the writer’s fancy; but he was far from being amused. More than one smothered but dismal yawn betrayed his weariness, and it was with a sigh of supreme relief that he at last returned them to his wife. “They are really clever,” he said, “and hardly objectionable. They are the kind of thing that a Chateaubriand might have written to a Madame Récamier, and she was the very archetype of female virtue. I can only regret the one fact that they were not addressed to your own house.” “My foolish cowardice was the sole cause of that error. I thought you would object to my receiving Mr. Desmond’s letters, and they were a great pleasure to me.” “My poor child, if you had only examined my library in Park Lane, you would have found a hundred volumes of letters, from Pliny downwards, all of them better than Mr. Desmond’s effusions. But I suppose there is a charm in being the sole recipient of a man’s confidences. Every man writes that kind of thing once in his life; I have done it myself.” “And can you forgive me freely?”