'Well, my old duck, Maggie, you have earned your money fairly, by all accounts--and my wonderful caligraphy was quite a success!' said Hawkey Sharpe, exploding with laughter, when he heard the narration of his 'fair' compatriot or conspirator, as he handed her a twenty-pound note, and drove with her townward in the cab with which he had awaited the termination of her visit at the Grange Loan. 'By Jove! a pleasant home-coming that fellow will have! "All men are brothers," says the minister of Earlshaugh; Cains and Abels, say I.' 'I don't care about him or what he may suffer--you men are all alike, a bad, false, cruel lot,' replied the woman; 'but, with all her airs and graces, her haughtiness and her touch-me-not manner, I _am_ sorry for what that poor girl may be--nay, must be--enduring now.' 'The devil you are! all things are fair in love and war--and this is _war_!' said Hawkey, still continuing his bursts of malignant laughter; 'would she care for what you might endure?' 'I am sure she would--her face and her voice were so sweet and gentle.' 'For all that she would draw aside her skirt if it touched yours, as though there was a taint in the contact.' The woman made no reply, but glared at him with defiant malevolence in her bold black eyes, and now seemed shocked at the very act which, a few minutes before, had given her much malignant satisfaction. But we have not heard the last of Mr. Hawkey Sharpe's skill in caligraphy. CHAPTER XLVII. THE RESULT. Sense returned to the unhappy creature ere her servants discovered her or knew that the mysterious visitor had departed. 'It cannot be! It cannot have happened--it is too dreadful--too cruel!' she repeated to herself again and again; but could she doubt the tenor of the letter she had seen and read--the letter in her husband's own handwriting? 'Oh, Heaven!' she murmured; 'our days together have been so blithesome and so happy, even when their brightest hours were clouded by a separation to come; but Oh, not such a separation as this! What have I done that God deems me so unworthy--that I am tortured, punished thus?' 'There is scarcely in the whole sad world,' it is said, 'and in the woeful scale of mental suffering, aught sadder than the helpless struggle of a poor human heart against a crushing load of misery, strengthening itself in its despair, taking courage from the extremity of its wretchedness in the frenzied whispers of reassurance.' Thus did Maude continue to whisper to herself: 'It cannot be--it cannot be!' She passed her hot hand several times across her throbbing forehead; her brain was too confused--too unable yet to grapple with this disillusion, the miserable situation, and with all the new and sudden horrors of her false and now degraded position in the world--in society, and in life!