MY DEAR SIR,--Thank you for your simple, explicit statement of the case. You gave me a great deal of amusement, and no pain. I wish your son had copied your style. I daresay he has told you that he meant to marry me; but though an imaginative child, I don’t suppose he can ever have said to you that I meant to marry him. I don’t make promises, and unless any unforeseen circumstance should arise, I am not likely to undertake the experiment. As to my moral influence (which I notice you have done me the honor not to mention), I have always made it my invariable rule to leave boys alone. I laugh at them, but I do not hurt them. Yours sincerely, ANASTASIA FALAISE. “Well, what do you make of that, my dear?” said Horace Lestrange, feeling after his matches. “Seems to let us out, doesn’t it?” Edith let the paper fall into her lap and looked into the fire. “Poor woman!” she said very gently. “Do you know, Horace, she reminds me just a little of Helen of Troy. Helen used to talk like that, as if the soul had been eaten out of her words. I think a woman must be very unhappy to write like that.” “It is time you went to bed, Edith; you look tired,” said her husband. “Just throw that letter on the fire, will you?” She threw the letter on to the fire and watched it burn. “Poor woman!” she whispered to herself again. “Poor woman!” Horace got up and opened the door for her. He was very much relieved, but he felt a pang of compunction at the same time. He had been a fool to tell Edith; it seemed to upset her; the facts of life--love’s tragedies--ought to be kept from good women. Then he went back to his paper. VII Like many people who believe in an over-ruling Providence, Miss Lestrange never left anything to it. On the contrary, when her plans succeeded, she remarked triumphantly that it was the will of heaven; and when they failed, she said nothing about it, and tried again. It is usually supposed that plans which play the part of Providence fail very easily, but this is not really so; it is only the result of the plan that fails--carefully combined arrangements made with due knowledge of the forces of life seldom fail. What fails is what we expected to win from such combinations. You plant, water, and gain your increase, and what you thought were the golden apples of the Hesperides taste like dust. This is what happened to Miss Lestrange. She gave a whole-hearted devotion to Leslie; she kept him away from what she honestly believed to be adverse influences; she cared for the delicate little boy until he became as strong as the average youth; she made her home his home; people always referred to him as “your dear boy.” This was the palace of her dreams, but the monarch had abdicated, and the palace without its King is a Court in mourning.