And now, a little brandy and water, and the envelope in the well-known female hand; and he laughed a little over it, and looked at himself in the glass with a vaunting complacency, and shook his head playfully at the envelope. It just crossed his sunshine like the shadow of a flying vapour--"that cross-grained old Gwynn would not venture to meddle?" But the envelope was honestly closed, and showed no signs of having been fiddled with. He made a luxury of this little letter, and read it in his easy chair, with his left leg over the arm, with the fragrant accompaniment of a weed. "Jealous, by Jove!" he ejaculated, in high glee; "little fool, what's put that in your head?" "Poor, little, fluttering, foolish thing!" sang the Baronet, and then laughed, not cynically, but indulgently rather. "How audacious the little fools are upon paper! Egad, it's a wonder there is not twice as much mischief in the world as actually happens. We must positively burn this little extravagance." But before doing so he read it over again; then smiling still, he gallantly touched it to his lips, and re-perused it, as he drew another cigar from the treasury of incense which he carried about him. He lighted the note, but did not apply it to his cigar, I am bound to say--partly from a fine feeling, and partly, I am afraid, because he thought that paper spoiled the flavour of his tobacco. So, with a sentimental smile, a gentle shrug, and a sigh of the Laurence Sterne pattern, he converted that dangerous little scrawl into ashes--and he thought, as he inhaled his weed-- "It is well for you, poor little fanatics, that we men take better care of you than you do of yourselves, sometimes!" No doubt; and Sir Jekyl supposed he was thinking only of his imprudent little correspondent, although there was another person in whom he was nearly interested, who might have been unpleasantly compromised also, if that document had fallen into other hands. CHAPTER VI. Sir Jekyl's Room is Visited. It was near one o'clock. Sir Jekyl yawned and wound his watch, and looked at his bed as if he would like to be in it without the trouble of getting there; and at that moment there came a sharp knock at his door, which startled him, for he thought all his people were asleep by that time. "Who's there?" he demanded in a loud key. "It's me, sir, please," said Donica Gwynn's voice. "Come in, will you?" cried he; and she entered. "Are you sick?" he asked. "No, sir, thank you," she replied, with a sharp courtesy. "You look so plaguy pale. Well, I'm glad you're not. But what the deuce can you want of me at this hour of night? Eh?" "It's only about that room, sir." "Oh, curse the room! Talk about it in the morning. You ought to have been in your bed an hour ago." "So I was, sir; but I could not sleep, sir, for thinking of it." "Well, go back and think of it, if you must. How can I stop you? Don't be a fool, old Gwynn."