Cosmo’s letter came to her, by the ordinary return of post, Anne tried to say to herself that of course he was right and she was wrong--nay more than that--that she had known exactly all through which was the more delicate and noble way, and that it was this. How could he come to Mount, he who had been turned away from it (though this was not quite true), who had been the cause of her disinheritance? How could he present himself the moment the father, who had objected to him so strenuously, was dead? Cosmo laid the whole case before her with what seemed the noblest frankness, in that letter. ‘I am in your hands,’ he said. ‘The faintest expression of a wish from you will change everything. Say to me, “Come,” and I will come, how gladly I need not say--but without that word, how can I intrude into the midst of a grief which, believe me, my dearest, I shall share, for it will be yours, but which by all the rest of the world will seem nothing but a deliverance and relief to me.’ Anne, who had not allowed herself to say a word, even to her own soul, of the sickening of disappointment and wonder in her, who had stood bravely dumb and refused to be conscious that she had expected him, felt her heart leap up with a visionary triumph of approval, when this letter came. Oh, how completely and nobly right he was! How superior in his instinctive sense of what it was most delicately honourable and fit to do, in such an emergency, to any other, or to herself even, who ought to have known better!