Very mechanically, and even indifferently, Josephine took it in her hand, and glancing at the name saw the clerk had made a mistake and given her what belonged to another. But she saw, too, something else, which turned her white as ashes, and riveted her for a moment to the spot with a feeling that she was either dying or mad, or both. _Surely_, she knew that writing. She had seen it times enough not to be mistaken. And she had thought the hand which penned it dead long ago, and laid away under the grass and flowers of Austria. “_Rossie_,” she tried to say, but her white lips would not move, and there was about them a strange prickling sensation which frightened her more than the numbness of her body. “I must get into the air where I can breathe,” she thought, and with a desperate effort she dragged herself to the street, taking the letter with her, and grasping it with a firm grip as if fearful of losing it, when in fact she had forgotten that she had it at all, until the air blowing on her face revived her somewhat and brought her back to a consciousness of what she was doing. Then her first impulse was to return the letter to Everard’s box, and she turned to go back when she saw her husband entering the office, and that decided her. She would not let him see the letter, for if there _were_ a great wrong somewhere, _he_ knew it and had contrived it, and the cold sweat broke out from every pore as she began dimly to conjecture the nature of the wrong, and to shudder at its enormity. She was feeling stronger now, and fearful lest her husband should overtake her she hurried across the common toward home, where she went at once to her room, and, locking the door, sat down to read that letter from the dead. She had made up her mind to do that during her rapid walk. She must know its contents, and so she broke the seal and began to read. And as she read she felt the blood curdle in her veins; there was a humming in her ears; a thick feeling in her tongue, and a kind of consciousness that she was somebody else, whose business for the rest of her life was to keep the letter and its contents a secret from the world. But where should she hide it that no one could ever find it, for nobody must see it? Safety, honor, _everything_ dear to her depended upon that. Not even her husband must look upon it or know that it was written; and where should she put it that he would not find it, for he took the liberty to look through her private drawers and boxes just when it pleased him to do so? She could not put the letter in a box or keep it about her person, and she dared not destroy it, though she made the attempt and lighted the gas in which to burn it to ashes. But as she held it to the blaze something seemed to grasp her hand and draw it back. And when she shook off the sensation of fear which had seized her, and again attempted the destruction of the note, the same effect was produced, and