“I beg you to retain the enclosed. They were given to you as an evidence of my esteem and admiration, as well as of my gratitude for your indulgent kindness to one so much beneath you as myself. I implore you to forget and pardon what has happened to-night. I am too ignorant of the world in which you live to know what I ought to do; and I can only assure you that I am ready to submit myself entirely to your discretion, and still hold myself bound by every word I said in this room on the day when you promised to be my wife. “Yours sincerely, “FRANCIS TREDETHLYN.” No one but the servants knew when or how Mr. Tredethlyn left the Cedars on that first night of the New Year; but a little before one o’clock the next day a letter was delivered to Mr. Hillary--a letter from the assistant-manager of a certain bank in the City, informing the merchant that a sum of twenty thousand pounds had that morning been placed to his credit. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XVII. SOMETHING LIKE FRIENDSHIP. Maude Hillary did not rise very early after that New Year’s entertainment at the Cedars; painful emotions, troubles, doubts, and perplexities, that had been unknown to her through all her previous lifetime, had crowded suddenly upon her within the last few weeks, and it was scarcely strange if she well-nigh fainted under the burden. She slept for some hours on that first night of the year,--slept the feverish, heavy slumber that waits upon trouble of mind and exhaustion of body. The winter sun shone with a chill brightness between the rose-coloured draperies of her window when she awoke from a painful dream to a dim sense of actual trouble that was still more painful. She remembered the scene of the previous night, her own desperate appeal for help, Francis Tredethlyn’s avowal, and Julia’s indignation. She remembered all this with a burning sense of shame, and with a tender and pitying regret for Julia’s wrongs. “And he did not love her!” she thought, “when I fancied they were so happy and united, so much what lovers ought to be; it was all false, after all, and he had deceived her. But why? What motive could he have for doing her so great a wrong?”