Her blank look of disappointment startled him. What was this violent fancy of hers for him? Was he wise, was he, indeed, doing right to encourage it? He began to fear that he had taken some dangerous step on that flowery way to destruction that he had hitherto succeeded in avoiding. Still, as he argued to himself walking home under the calm night sky, why should he think there was anything approaching to danger in the kindly feeling this young, beautiful creature entertained for him? “I am absurdly vain to think of such a thing,” he told himself with a scornful laugh. “I, more than middle-aged, white-haired, awkward, stupid in women’s society, she can only feel a mixture of pity and confidence. How absurd it is of me to make a mountain out of a molehill!” He went to bed with a heavy heart, accusing himself of ingratitude to the princess. “I ought to feel flattered at it all, I suppose,” he said when he awoke, his spirits oppressed with the feeling of something going wrong in his life. Instead of this, he felt utterly wretched. Had he expected to hear from Mercedes? He did not know. He only knew that he turned over his letters with a sense of disappointment, and although he talked with Mrs. Mervyn about the opera, and listened to her and to Ralph’s hints of some pleasant surprise in store for him in the arrangements at the Pinewood, he could not have given an account of the conversation afterwards had his life depended upon it. He had hard work to concentrate his energies upon his work that day. When he returned home he found a letter—a letter with the Andriocchi arms on the flap of the envelope, with his name in that graceful, sloping writing. It lay among many others on his library table. If he had really doubted the girl’s power over his emotions, the eagerness with which he pounced upon it would have told him the truth. Before he read it he locked the door. Another desperate symptom, had he been reflecting on his own case. But he was not. He had but one feeling, intense relief. He had been fearing he had offended her, and he had not done so. He opened the envelope. The enclosed sheet of notepaper contained but a few words: “I release you from your promise. Farewell. “MERCEDES.” The date; her address; those few words. No more. In his present frame of mind, it was a shock. At first he paced the room, his old habit when perturbed. Then after gloomy self-chidings, during which he thought of himself as an inhuman bear who had trampled on the generous nature of one of the sweetest women God had ever created—he stopped short, consoled by a new thought. “What did I do, or say?” he asked himself. “I only made excuses to get away from a fashionable entertainment. I did not slight _her_ personally. She is a child! She has jumped to some conclusion or another—I must write at once and disabuse her of it, whatever it is.” He sat down, and wrote:—