She looked at the envelope curiously. The original address was almost undecipherable, being defaced with innumerable new ones, or brief notices, "Gone away;" "Try so and so." Still the name was hers. A bill likely, sent to her old London address and forwarded to the Crimea and back again. Twice, so it seemed to her as she tried to decipher the postmarks. Then she opened it, noting with a vague spasm of memory that a curious embossed presentment of foxhounds in full cry ran right across the flap. Where had she seen that device before? Surely on some envelope that Marmaduke-- The writing too was vaguely familiar. The writing of a person with brains, but strangely shaky and irregular: "DEAR MADAM, "Since my son Marmaduke has chosen to deprive me of the possibility of an heir by dying--not even on the field of battle--out at Varna, I return the enclosed. I don't know why I kept it. To have a hold over the young man at bottom, I expect. Perhaps for other reasons. One doesn't often meet women of your description. Anyhow, I haven't. "You can now claim your position and dowry, which my d----d cousin can very well afford to pay. "Besides, you are worth providing for; more, at any rate than my Lady and Penelope, and I have done that. So I die quits; except for my son Peter. Why didn't he get cholera instead of Marmaduke? I could have spared him. "Yours, "DRUMMUIR." The enclosure was the copy of the marriage lines which she thought she had seen the old lord in the act of destroying as she had left the room. Yes, across the middle fold the beginning of a tear slit the paper. She sat with the letter in her hand until the cry of a child made her rise hastily and go to her task of motherhood. L'ENVOI "And you mean to say," said Peter Muir, when he had heard her tale, "that knowing this imp," he looked at the child she carried, "who is to turn me out, was on the way you burnt that paper found in Marmaduke's despatch-box? I give up. Thank God one does not often meet women of your description!" But as he spoke he was looking in the child's face. "He will be the image of his father," he remarked at last, "and, dash it all! but I am glad, yes, glad he's here!" Then, with a shrug of his shoulders, he turned away. "It will be a sell for the Jews, I'm afraid, though it serves the horse-leeches very well right!"