Angus Hamleigh's letter came upon Christabel like a torrent of cold water, as if that bright silvery arc which pierces the rock at St. Nectan's Kieve had struck upon her heart with its icy stream, and chilled it into stone. All through that long summer day upon which her letter must arrive at Hillside, she had lived in nervous expectation of a telegram expressing indignation, remonstrance, pleading, anger--a savage denial of her right to renounce her lover--to break her engagement. She had made up her mind in all good faith. She meant to go on to the bitter end, in the teeth of her lover's opposition, to complete her renunciation in favour of that frail creature who had so solemn a claim upon Angus Hamleigh's honour. She meant to fight this good fight--but she expected that the struggle would be hard. Oh, how long and dismal those summer hours seemed, which she spent in her own room, trying to read, trying to comfort herself with saddest strains of classic melody, and always and through all listening for the telegraph boy's knock at the hall door, or for the sudden stopping of a hansom against the kerb, bringing home her lover to remonstrate in person, in defiance of all calculations of time and space. There was no telegram. She had to wait nearly twenty-four hours for the slow transit of the mails from the high latitude of Inverness. And when she read Angus Hamleigh's letter--those few placid words which so quietly left her free to take her own way--her heart sank with a dull despair that was infinitely worse than the keen agonies of the last few days. The finality of that brief letter--the willingness to surrender her--the cold indifference, as it seemed, to her future fate--was the hardest blow of all. Too surely it confirmed all those humiliating doubts which had tortured her since her discovery of that wretched past. He had never really cared for her. It was she who had forced him into an avowal of affection by her unconscious revelation of love--she who, unmaidenly in her ignorance of life and mankind, had been the wooer rather than the wooed. "Thank God that my pride and my duty helped me to decide," she said to herself: "what should I have done if I had married him and found out afterwards how weak a hold I had upon his heart--if he had told me one day that he had married me out of pity." Christabel told Mrs. Tregonell she had written to Mr. Hamleigh--she spoke of him only as Mr. Hamleigh now--and had received his reply, and that all was now over between them. "I want you to return his presents for me, Auntie," she said. "They are too valuable to be sent to his chambers while he is away--the diamond necklace which he gave me on my birthday--just like that one I saw on the stage--I suppose he thinks all women have exactly the same ideas and fancies--the books too--I will put them all together for you to return."