The whole household was asleep, but even so, she locked the door before coming back to her station by the fire. She put more coal on the now glowing embers, and then she took up another letter Oliver had written to her, a letter written from Paris just after he and her brother had left London together for that long holiday on the Continent. Outwardly it was a commonplace letter enough concerning a change in certain of her investments; but when she held it to the fire, between the black lines there again started into pulsing life another message, winged from his soul to hers.... "Laura, I have sworn not to speak to you of love, and even in this letter which you will never see, I will not break my oath. But as I go in and out of the old Paris churches (where alone I find a certain measure of solace and peace), in the women whom I see there praying I often seem to discover something akin to your spiritual and physical perfection. "It is strange, considering the business on which I am engaged, that I should feel thus drawn to haunt these old, dim Paris churches, but there at least I can escape from Gillie, of Gillie who talks perpetually of Godfrey, your owner and your tyrant." And as she read these last words, there came a cold feeling over Laura's heart. She realised, for the first time, how Oliver had hated Godfrey. She read on: "Gillie does not understand the reverence in which I hold you. Sometimes when he speaks of you--of you and Godfrey--I feel as if some day I shall strike him on the mouth. "But he is your brother, Laura. According to the measure which is in the man he loves you, aye, and even reverences you too, in his fashion; but with this reverence is mingled a touch of pity, of contempt, that you should be what he calls 'good.'" Good? Laura looked up and stared into the now glowing fire. Good in a narrow, effortless sense she had always been, but to the man who was so little her owner, though so much at times her tyrant, she had been, almost from the very first, hard, and utterly lacking in sympathy. It was with relief that Laura burnt that letter. The notes Oliver Tropenell had written to her in London while he was conducting the investigation into Godfrey Pavely's disappearance, held, to her disappointment, no secret writing in between. But the letters she had received from him since her widowhood all had an invisible counterpart. The first was written on ship-board: "Laura, I am now free to speak to you of love. The world would say that I must wait in spirit as I have waited in body, but I know at what a cost has been bought the relief from the vow which I faithfully kept.