“He bowed and smiled, and took them. What else could he, could any gentleman, do? And we came away, and she was in the seventh heaven; and we both thought--her father and I both thought--would not you have thought?--that there was an end of it!” “Yes, I should.” The bareness of this assent is due to the difficulty experienced by the speaker in refraining from expressing how incredible and “beyond all whooping” it appears to her, that to such a transaction there should have been a beginning. “She has always been rather a ‘handful,’” goes on the mother, with rueful dispassionateness--“determined to be unconventional and unlike other people, and all that sort of stuff; but it never entered our heads that she would be so lost to all decency, to all self-respect, as to do this!--throwing herself at him like a woman in Regent Street; for that is what it comes to.” The poor lady has worked herself up into a whirlwind of tears and sobs, which her young friend charitably hopes may relieve her. “And you neither of you had the least suspicion?” “Not the very least mite,” replied Mrs. Prince, who, though in everyday life _almost_ quite ladylike, is apt, under the pressure of high emotion, to lapse into homely phrases that smack of her unregenerate state before the world-wide success of “Prince’s Dropless Candle,” the Féodorovna, had lifted her into affluence and the habit of wearing her _h_’s every day. “She has always had a very large correspondence”--with an accent that tells of murdered pride in the fact recorded--“writing to and receiving letters from people that neither her father nor I ever heard of! It was an understood thing that we should ask no questions. I should as soon have thought of flying in the air as saying to her, ‘Whom have you heard from?’” “Then how--how did you learn about _it_?” “She gave me the letter to read. We were at breakfast--her father and I--reading our papers, in such good spirits over the surrender of Kronje; it seems a year ago”--with a transient look of bewilderment--“and in she came, holding an open letter in her hand, and said, with that odd smile she sometimes puts on--I am always uneasy when I see that smile--‘There has sometimes been a little soreness about my keeping my correspondence to myself. Here is a letter that I invite you both to read,’ and she laid it down on the table before me!” The mother pauses, her face working. “Well?” in a breathless sympathy. “I just glanced at the signature, and saw it was his. But even then it never struck me--I did not put two and two together. Who could have imagined such a thing about her own child? And she had not mentioned his name for weeks.” “No?” “I read it!” pausing to gasp, “and then her father read it!” “Yes?” “I--I have nothing to say against it,” speaking with twitching lips. “It was everything that was honourable and gentlemanlike!”