“The thought that your presence would swell the bill at this ‘d----d pot-house’ as he calls it, would do more to retard his cure than even your ministrations could counteract; so stay where you are, and look after Binning, to whom please give my love. You know that among the many feminine graces for which you despise me, the gift of nursing is not the least!” Then follows a postscript: “The poor old fellow caught his chill walking with me through yesterday’s storm, to save the expense of a cab or bus to a jeweller’s in the City, about an enamelled girdle he is having made for you; and which I have been helping him to design. Now that it is too late, he is unnaturally good and obedient--a state of things I hope to maintain by encouraging the terror under which he labours of not being well by the 28th.” Such was certainly not Rupert Campion’s intention in writing this letter, yet the impression derived from it by his _fiancée_ is that never were so many unpleasant facts and suggestions crowded into four sides of a sheet of note-paper. Her uncle is seriously ill, and she is not to be allowed to go to him because he is saving all his money for her and Rupert’s younger children. He has contracted his illness in the quest of an expensive ornament for her, which will add one more link to the enormous chain of obligations which is tying up her liberty with ever tighter and tighter knots. Rupert has given an added proof of his hopelessly unmanly tastes by designing the jewel. In a dreadful flash of prophetic insight, she sees him, in the terrible matter-of-fact freedom of married life, sitting with his arm round her waist, and quoting Waller-- “That which her slender waist confined Shall now my joyful temples bind.” He has sent his “love” with school-girl effusiveness to Binning; and, last and worst offence, he has alluded to the 28th! For some moments the girl stands looking vaguely out at the rhododendron belts and azalea beds, the lawns and _parterres_, with a horrible feeling of hatred and physical nausea towards the man with whom she is to pass her life. Then the horror is transferred to herself, and strong reaction follows. She thrusts the letter into her pocket, goes back to her former seat, and picks up the book. Her action seems to forbid question or intrusion. But in a moment or two she lays down the volume, and makes her expiation. It does not look like one at first. “Do not you think that complete unselfishness is the highest as well as the rarest quality that a man can possess?” He is so much taken aback by the triteness and apparent irrelevance of the question, that she is able to enlarge uninterrupted upon her dog’s-eared theme. “I mean do not you think that it is to be set far above generosity, or endurance, or courage, or any of that sort of showy virtues?” “Are they showy?” “They get a great deal more _kudos_, at any rate!” she retorts, with a heat he does not understand. “Do not you agree with me?”