"The past is dead, the future is my own. I look back, dear love, to the few moments we had by the great window in your drawing-room, when my mother was talking to Alice over by the fire. You were so gentle, so sweet, to me then. It was as if--God forgive me for my presumption--you were regretting my departure. Till that moment I had felt as if the man who had once called you wife stood between us, an angry, menacing shape. But he vanished then, in that house of which he had never been the real master. And since that day he has not haunted me as he haunted me during those long long days of waiting for the news I at once longed for and dreaded. "When I come back I shall not ask you to love me, I shall only humbly ask you to let me love you." Laura went to her writing-table and turned on the light. She moved as one walking in her sleep, for she was in an extraordinary state of spiritual and mental exaltation. She drew a sheet of paper towards her, and before burning the letter she still held in her hand, she copied out, not all, but a certain part of what had been written there in that invisible ink which only flashed into being when held up against a flame. Then she went back to the fire, and read the next letter--and the next. In a sense they were alike--alike in the measureless love, the almost anguished longing for her presence they expressed, and in their abhorrence, hatred, contempt for the man who had been her husband. It was as if Oliver, in spite of his confident words in the letter which had been written on shipboard, could not forget Godfrey--as if perpetually he felt the dead man's menacing presence to be there, between them. Laura was amazed, troubled, and yet at the same time profoundly stirred and excited by Oliver's retrospective jealousy. It seemed to prove to her as nothing else could have done how passionately, exclusively he loved her, and had always loved her. Though none of those about her were aware of it, the mistress of The Chase became henceforth a different woman. It was as though she had suddenly become alive where she had been dead, articulate instead of dumb. Each night, when the house was plunged in darkness and slumber, Laura would light three candles, and read the words of longing and of love which Oliver had written in between the formal lines of the last letter she had received from him. And then, when a new letter came, she would burn the one that had come before--the one whose contents she had already long known by heart.