"If you please, ma'am," here interrupted Williams, who had remained standing at the door after Mrs. Werner's entrance, with an apologetic grasp upon the handle, "Mrs. Mortomley left a note for you. She told me not to mention this till all the company had left, but I suppose, under present circumstances, it is correct for me to do so." "I will go for it," Mrs. Werner said, with a little gasp, but Mr. Werner prevented her intention. "Let your maid do so." There ensued an awkward pause, during which Mr. Kleinwort, with much _empressement_, handed Mrs. Werner a chair. "No, thank you," she remarked, and the pause continued, and the depth and gloom of the silence increased minute by minute. At length the maid, having found the note, brought it into the room. "Give it to me," exclaimed Mr. Forde, trying to snatch it off the salver, but Mrs. Werner's face warned him of the impropriety he had committed. "The note is intended for me, Mr. Forde, I think," she said quietly, and opened the envelope after a courteous "Pray excuse me." As she read her face darkened. "Where are they, where have they gone?" demanded Mr. Forde eagerly. Mrs. Werner lifted her eyes and looked at him slowly and absently, as if she had forgotten his existence. "I do not know," she answered. "Mrs. Mortomley does not say, and I have not an idea unless they have returned to Homewood. Mrs. Mortomley unfortunately understood Mr. Werner objected to my having invited her and her husband here, and she hastened to leave a house where their presence was unwelcome." Having unburdened herself of which statement, Mrs. Werner gathered up her ample skirt, and with a distant bow to both gentlemen left the room. Mr. Werner went after her. "Leonora," he said as she ascended the staircase, but she never answered him. "Leonora," he repeated, but still she made no more sign than if she had been deaf. Then following rapidly, he stood beside her on the landing. "Leonora," he entreated, laying his hand on her arm with a pleading gentleness difficult to associate with Henry Werner. She stood quite still and looked at him with an expression he had never seen on her face before through all their married life, which God pity any man who ever sees it in the face of his wife, in the face of the mother of his children. "Do not speak to me about them to-night," she said. "Hereafter perhaps, but not now," and her voice was changed and hard as Dolly had heard it. "Will you give me her note?" he asked. "Yes, it is your right," and she gave him the paper she held crushed in her hand, a paper on which Dolly had traced mad words in wonderful hieroglyphics. After his guests had all departed, when the house was silent and quiet and lonely, and he was quite by himself, Henry Werner smoothed out that crumpled manuscript and read the sentences Dolly had written in her haste.