As he looked at the letter closely, turning it this way and that, he suddenly told himself that it did not read like the work of an illiterate person. Godfrey, and Laura too, were in their different ways very good employers; besides, they had not dismissed any one lately. No, no--it was far more likely to be some one living in Pewsbury, probably with whom he was scarcely acquainted. There were, as the banker could not but be aware, a good many people in the little town who had reason to dislike him--not personally perhaps, but as the one money-dealer of the place. At last he sat down at his writing-table and drew an envelope towards him. On it he wrote, "To be destroyed, unopened, in case of my death," and then he placed the poisonous little sheet of common notepaper in the envelope, and, fastening it down, put it in one of his inner pockets. He intended to dismiss the whole thing from his mind, at any rate during this morning, but he found it very difficult, not to say impossible, to do that. Laura and Oliver Tropenell? His thin lips curled at the thought. Why, Oliver liked him, Godfrey, far better than he did Laura! He regarded that as certain. And Laura? He could have laughed aloud at the absurd suggestion. Laura was not only the coldest, she was also the most upright, of women. Early in their married life, when they had gone about together far more than they had done recently, he, Godfrey, had never felt even a twinge of jealousy with regard to her. And yet--and yet in those days Laura had certainly excited a good deal of admiration. There are men who passionately admire that kind of proud, passionless beauty in a woman. Pavely himself had once been such a man. So he knew. He looked up from the letter he was writing, and all at once, to his own surprise, his thoughts took quite another turn. He told himself suddenly that Tropenell's rather exceptional intimacy with them both might, after all, excite remark, in such a damned censorious, gossiping place as was Pewsbury. He, Godfrey Pavely, was well aware of what a nest of gossip a country town could be, and often is. He had experienced something of it years ago, when there had been all that foolish talk concerning the then Katty Fenton and himself. Once or twice he had felt slightly uneasy lest his _present_ friendship with Katty should be misunderstood. Indeed, he had felt this so strongly to give her what he had thought to be a delicate hint--a hint that she had at once taken--as to the inadvisability of her coming, when in Pewsbury, to see him in his private room at the Bank. She had done that rather often at one time, when she was first his tenant at Rosedean. But now she never came to the Bank. She did not even keep her account at Pavely's, though it would have been a convenience to her to do so. * * * * *