“That’s the lot, I think,” he said, and was crushing up the circulars preparatory to throwing them into the fireplace, when another rather bulky letter, in a common thin envelope and addressed in an unformed handwriting, fell from among them. He picked it up and examined it, a certain distrust of this innocent-looking epistle creeping into his mind. “I wonder what it is?” he thought to himself: “another of Reginald’s bills, or a fresh application for money from one of his intimate friends? Any way I don’t know the writing, and I have half a mind to tear it up unread. Letters that look like that always contain something disagreeable.” He threw it down on the dressing-table while he arranged his necktie, and hunted for a stud which had rolled under a chest of drawers. Indeed, the excitement of this wild pursuit put the letter out of his mind till he went to brush his hair, when the inaccurate superscription of “Sir H. Grave” immediately caught his eye, and he opened it at once. The first words that he saw were “see fit to act like an honest man.” “As I thought,” he said aloud, “here’s another of Reginald’s legacies with the bill inside.” And uttering an exclamation he lifted the letter to throw it into the fireplace, when its enclosure slipped out of it. Then Henry turned pale, for he knew the writing: it was Joan Haste’s. In five more minutes he had read both the documents through, and was sitting on his bed staring vacantly before him like a man in a trance. He may have sat like this for ten minutes, then he rose, saying in a perfectly quiet voice, as though he were addressing the bodily presence of Mrs. Bird: “Of course, my dear madam, you are absolutely right; the only thing to do is to marry her at once, and I am infinitely obliged to you for bringing these facts to my notice; but I must say that if ever a man got into a worse or more unlucky scrape, I never heard of it.” And he laughed. Then he re-read Joan’s wandering words very carefully, and while he did so his eyes filled with tears. “My darling! What you must have suffered!” he said, pressing the letter against his heart. “I love you! I love you! I would never say it before, but I say it now once and for all, and I thank God that He has spared you and given me the right to marry you and the chance of making you happy. Well, the thing is settled now, and it only remains to carry it through. First of all my mother must be told, which will be a pleasant business,—I am glad, by the way, that Ellen has gone before I got this, for I believe that I should have had words with her. To think of my looking at that cloak and never seeing the woman who wore it, although she saw me! I remember the incident perfectly well, and one would have imagined——But so much for thought transference and the rest of it. Well, I suppose that I may as well go down to breakfast. It is a very strange world and a very sad one too.”