The letter which Francis Tredethlyn wrote in his study was a long one; a very painful one to write, as it seemed, from the face of the writer, and the weary sigh which every now and then escaped from his lips, as his hurrying pen paused for a moment. It was close upon ten o’clock when he began the letter. The clock chimed the half-hour after eleven while he was sealing it. He addressed the envelope, and then threw himself back in his chair to think. He had so much to think of. Maude’s extraordinary conduct, Rosa Grunderson’s revelation, had overthrown the whole fabric of his life; and he found himself surrounded by ruins whose utter chaos he could not contemplate without bewilderment. For the last few weeks his thoughts had been almost exclusively devoted to his cousin Susan, and her wrongs. Found at last, after so many failures and disappointments, so much delay, the lonely girl had been welcomed as tenderly as any wanderer who ever returned to the lost friends of his youth. But Susan Lesley had a sad story to tell her cousin. The missing link in the chain that Francis Tredethlyn had put together piece by piece was the letter which had been written from St. Petersburg by the man whom Susan had loved and trusted--the man whose diary had revealed to Francis the utter worthlessness of his character. Robert Lesley’s letter was only a worthy companion to Robert Lesley’s diary. In it he coldly and deliberately told the girl who loved him, that she was not his wife; that the Marylebone marriage was no marriage; the registrar no recognized official, but a scoundrel hired for a twenty-pound note to play the part of that functionary; that the registrar’s office had been no office, but a lodging-house parlour hired for the occasion, and half-a-dozen doors from the real office. This statement was, of course, accompanied by the usual heartless sophistries which run so glibly from the pen, or fall so smoothly from the lips, of an utterly heartless man. The self-confessed betrayer pleaded the madness of an all-absorbing love; the stern necessities of well-bred poverty; the pressure of family circumstances; the fear of a father’s rage; and then, in conclusion, the writer stated the pitiful stipend which he was prepared to offer to the woman he had abandoned, and the child he had disowned.