“I have made a discovery which is of the very deepest importance to us, and to the memory of my poor brother Tom, who was your friend. I have no right to ask your help, but I do, knowing you will not refuse me. Come to me, I beg of you, for Tom’s sake. I write in great haste to save the post. Oh, Mr. Fanshawe, come! “M. H. H.” Across this brief letter was written, very much blotted, a single line. “I have found----” He made out as much as this, but the last letters were so blotted that he could not decipher them. It looked like a name. Whom had she found? or what could have happened to excite her so? But he scarcely paused to ask himself these questions. He was too late for the day mail to Scotland--how he cursed himself for his indolence!--and had to wait the whole day through till the evening. At one time he thought of telegraphing to her; but there lingered a hope in Fanshawe’s mind that perhaps she had sent for him of her own impulse, and that “everybody” was not in the secret, a hope which he loved to cherish. He waited accordingly, most drearily, trying to get through the time as he best could, and finding it drag so that the day seemed to him as long as all the preceding year. He went from one club to another, by way of getting through the time; he went and made all sorts of ridiculous purchases; he looked at his watch about a million times; indeed, he kept dragging it in and out of his pocket, and watching the slow fluctuations of light in the afternoon, like a man possessed by one sole idea--which was a perpetual calculation how soon it would be nine o’clock.