The letter was a bulky one, and bore the Wembury and other post-marks, and to Shafto's infinite relief was addressed in the familiar handwriting of Dulcie Carlyon. He chuckled, and a great thought worthy of himself occurred to him. In the solitude of his own room at the hotel, he moistened and opened the gummed envelope, and drew forth four closely written sheets of paper full of the outpourings of the girl's passionate heart, of her wrath at the theft of her locket by Shafto, and mentioning that she had incidentally got the address of Mr. Kippilaw from her father, and desiring him to write to her, and she would watch for and intercept the postman by the sea-shore. 'Bosh,' muttered Shafto, as he tore up and cast into the fire Dulcie's letter, all save a postscript, written on a separate scrap of paper, and which ran thus:-- 'You have all the love of my heart, Florian; but, as I feel and fear we may never meet again, I send you this, which I have worn next my heart, to keep.' _This_ was a tiny tuft of forget-me-nots. 'Three stamps on all this raggabash!' exclaimed Shafto, whom the girl's terms of endearment to Florian filled with a tempest of jealous rage. He rolled the locket he had wrenched from Dulcie's neck in soft paper, and placed it with the postscript in the envelope, which he carefully closed and re-gummed, placed near the fire, and the moment it was perfectly dry he gave it to Florian. If the latter was surprised to see a letter to himself, addressed in Dulcie's large, clear, and pretty handwriting, to the care of 'Lawyer Kippilaw,' as she called him, he was also struck dumb when he found in the envelope the locket, the likeness, and the apparently curt farewell contained in one brief sentence! For a time he stood like one petrified. Could it all be real? Alas! there was no doubting the postal marks and stamps upon this most fatal cover; and while he was examining it and passing his hand wildly more than once across his eyes and forehead, Shafto was smoking quietly at a window, and to all appearance intent on watching the towering rock and batteries of the Castle, bathed in morning sunshine--batteries whereon steel morions and Scottish spears had often gleamed of old. Though his soul shrank from doing so, Florian could not resist taking Shafto into his confidence about this unexplainable event; and the latter acted astonishment to the life! Was the locket thus returned through the post in obedience to her father's orders, after he had probably discovered the contents of it? But Shafto demolished this hope by drawing his attention to the tenor of the pithy scrap of paper, which precluded the idea that it had been done under any other influence than her own change of mind. 'Poor Florian!' sneered Shafto, as he prepared to take his departure for Craigengowan; 'now you had better proceed at once to cultivate the wear-the-willow state of mind.'