May was by this time so shaken by sobs and so miserable that her condition was pitiful. Mrs. Neligage glided to a seat beside her, and took the girl in her arms in a fashion truly motherly. "There, there, May," said she soothingly. "Don't give way so. We must do something to straighten things out." "Oh, do you think we could?" demanded May, looking up through her tears. "Can't you get that letter away from him?" "I tried to make him give it to me, but he refused." It really seemed a pity that the widow was not upon the stage, so admirably did she show sympathy in voice and manner. She caressed the tearful maiden, and every tone was like an endearment. "Somebody must get that letter," she went on. "It would be fatal to leave it in the Count's possession. He is an old hand at this sort of thing. I knew about him abroad." She might have added with truth that she had herself come near marrying him, supposing that he had a fortune to match his title, but that she had luckily discovered his poverty in time. "But who can get it?" asked May, checking her tears as well as was possible under the circumstances. "It must be somebody who has the right to represent you," Mrs. Neligage responded with an air of much impressiveness. "Anybody may represent me," declared May. "Couldn't you do it, Mrs. Neligage?" "My dear," the other answered in a voice of remonstrance, "a lady could hardly go to a man on an errand like that. It must be a man." May dashed her hands together in a burst of impatience and despair. "Oh, I don't see what you gave it to him for," she cried in a lamentable voice. "You might have known that I wouldn't have written it if I'd any idea that that old thing was Christopher Calumus." "And I wouldn't have given it to him," returned Mrs. Neligage quietly, "if I'd had any idea that you were capable of writing to men you didn't know." May looked as if the tone in which this was said or the words themselves had completed her demoralization. She was bewitching in her misery, her eyes swimming divinely in tears, large and pathetic and browner than ever, her hair ruffled in her agitation into tiny rings and pliant wisps all about her temples, her cheeks flushed and moist. Her mouth, with its trembling little lips, might have moved the sternest heart of man to compassion and to the desire at least of consoling it with kisses. The more firm and logical feminine mind of Mrs. Neligage was not, however, by all this loveliness of woe turned away from her purpose. "At any rate," she went on, "the thing that can't be altered is that you have written the letter, and that the Count has it. I do pity you terribly, May; and I know Count Shimbowski, so I know what I'm saying. I came in this morning to say something to you, to propose something, that is; but I don't know how you'll take it. It is a way out of the trouble."