An interruption soon occurs in the shape of a letter for Lavinia--arrived by the afternoon post, overlooked in passing through the hall, and now brought her by a servant. Her colour changes as she recognizes the handwriting. There must be something very wrong in her “State of Denmark,” as she has time to realize in a flash of compunction, for her to feel as she does, that there is an indecency in her reading a letter from Rupert under Binning’s eyes. Yet she must read it at once, too, since the fact of his writing implies something unusual, as he and his father are to return to-morrow morning, and she has never encouraged nor he permitted himself love-letters written only for love’s sake. Asking leave of her companion, formally yet with hurried uneasiness she opens and reads the missive, seen at the first glance to be unaccountably long. The man, to put her at ease and make her feel free from observation, picks up the dropped volume; but over its top, or through its boards--since such little miracles are of easy performance to that most bogus of blind beggars, god Eros--he sees that, whatever her news may be, it is of an oversetting nature. “They are not coming home to-morrow.” This cannot be what has upset her. There must be something more. “Has the baptismal register not turned up yet?” “Yes, it was found on Thursday in St. Mary Abbotts.” He must wait her time. “My uncle is laid up ill in London.” “Gout?” “Yes; but not simple gout. He felt an attack coming on, and dosed himself with the very strong remedies which the doctor has always forbidden him; got a chill on the top of that; and now he has driven it in.” “And has sent for you to nurse him?” “No; he will not hear of it.” She shuts herself up into her letter, and he gets nothing more out of her for a while. She has even moved quite away from him to a distant window; still with that odd sense of immodesty in reading it while his eyes are upon her. “I know what your impulse will be,” Rupert writes; “but you must resist it. It is not _façon de parler;_ but he would be seriously annoyed by your coming up. It seems difficult to believe it, knowing as we have done all our lives his absolute carelessness about money; but it is, nevertheless, true that of late his one idea has been to screw and pinch in every possible way for----” The “for” is carefully erased; and the object of Sir George’s parsimonies left unstated; but had it been printed on a poster in letters six feet high, Lavinia could not have read more clearly that it is for those terrible unescapeable younger children of hers that Sir George is lopping his little luxuries.