"Very well," it ran. "I do not pretend to say I was not prepared after your last letter from New York. And although I could not guess your motive in accepting me, I knew that you did not love me. But if I am not overwhelmed with surprise, the pain is no easier on that account, and will not be until the grass has had time to grow over it a little. And at least it is a relief to know the worst. Of course I forgive you. I doubt if any man could feel bitterly toward you. You compel too much love for that. "Don't worry about me. I have work enough to do--a State to talk sense into and a nation to which to devote my poor energies. My brain such as it is will be constantly occupied, which is the next best good a man can have." ROBERT BURLEIGH. Betty wrote him four pages of enthusiastic friendliness in reply, and paid him the compliment of postponing her letter to Senator North until the following day. But on that day she rose with the feeling that the sun never would set. She was as brief as possible, for she knew that he hated long letters. Nevertheless, she conveyed an exact impression of her weeks of deliberation and analysis. "I want you to understand," she went on, "that my only wish when I came here for solitary thought was to do the right thing, irrespective of my own wishes in the matter. But it seems to me there is exactly as much to be said on one side as on the other, and it all comes to this: right or wrong, I have decided for you because I love you; and if you no longer can admire me, if you think that I have violated my sense of honour, then at least I shall marry no one else. B. M." And as her imagination was strong she did allow herself to be tortured by doubts during the three days that elapsed before she heard from him. She had hoped he would telegraph, but he did not, and her imagination and her common-sense had a long and indecisive argument which threatened ultimate depression. On the third night, however, a messenger from the hotel opposite brought her a note from Senator North. "I don't know that your mental exercise has done you any harm," he had written, "but it certainly was thrown away. You have too much common-sense and too thorough a capacity for loving to do anything so foolish or so outrageous as to marry the wrong man. If you had followed a romantic impulse--induced by nervous excitement--and married him the day you learned that your word might be put to too severe a test, you would have been miserable, and so would Burleigh. A mistaken sense of duty has been the cause of quite one fourth of the unhappiness of mankind, and few have been so bigoted as not to acknowledge this when too late. And a broken engagement is a small injustice to a man compared to a lifetime with an unloving wife. Burleigh is unhappy now, but it is no lack of admiration which prompts me to say that if he had married you he would have been unhappier still. You could do nothing by halves.