He sat heavily and motionlessly in his chair--a tall, powerfully-built man with gloomy brow and a thick dark beard. In his right hand he held an envelope, which had been torn open; but, after reading the enclosure, he had mechanically put it back. The envelope bore the name of Geoffrey Herne, in a woman's handwriting, and the London postmark. About half an hour had gone by since Herne read the letter, during which time he had been sitting as he was now, plunged in thought. His meditations had not, however, been occupied all that time with the subject of the letter; but certain passages in his past life had been passing in review before his mind: passages in which Ellice Quentin was the central figure. She was a slender girl when he first knew her, looking taller than she was, with strange grey-green eyes, and a clear but bright colour in her cheeks. Her face was very attractive to some people, though it had no pretensions to regular beauty; the features were delicately but oddly formed, indicating a refined and talented but wayward and unaccountable nature. In her ordinary home life, and also when she was in the company of those she did not like, she was silent, repellent, and cold; but she not seldom in favouring circumstances kindled into brilliance of talk and action; and there was a vein of passion in her which was itself the secret of her frequent coldness. Her lips, red as blood, were gracefully moulded and were perfectly under her control; by subtle modulations she could render them expressive of any emotion. Her figure was slight at this time, and scarcely as fully developed as that of most girls of her age; but she never made an ungainly movement, or fell into an awkward position; and she had such a genius for costume that whatever she put on straightway seemed to become an organic part of her. Her wrists were slender and long, and her fingers tapered almost to a point: Geoffrey Herne had felt their touch upon his face as soft as the thrill of delight that at the same moment swept his heart. But that was not until many months after their first meeting, which was unromantic enough; Mr. Quentin having invited him to dinner to discuss some professional business (Herne was a barrister). Ellice had treated him on this occasion with undisguised superciliousness, somewhat to Herne's amusement at first; for Mr. Quentin--an obese and ineffective elderly gentleman--though he boasted of blue blood somewhere in his veins, was far from being in a prosperous or dignified worldly condition; was very poor, in fact, and thought of nothing but obtaining possession of some property to which he had a very questionable claim. Meanwhile tradesmen used to present their bills with annotations at the bottom, intimating a desire more or less urgent to have them settled at once. Hereupon poor Mr. Quentin would wince and splutter; but Ellice, leaning back in her chair, with her hands folded on her lap, would meet his eye coldly