"So I am to be lectured and preached to besides. Good heavens! In his lofty manner, I suppose, that people talk of. Prig--odious, insufferable prig! So I have mistaken George, have I? My own husband! And insulted her--_her_! And she is actually downstairs, writing to me, in my own house!" She locked her hands, and began stormily to pace the room again. The image of her rival, only a few feet from her, bending over George's table, worked in her with poisonous force. Suddenly she swept to the bell and rang it. A door opened downstairs. She ran to the landing. "Kenrick!" "Yes, my lady." She heard a pause, and the soft rustle of a dress. "Tell Lady Maxwell, please"--she struggled hard for the right, the dignified tone--"that if it is not too late for her to stay, I am now able to see her." She hurried back into the drawing-room and waited. _Would_ she come? Letty's whole being was now throbbing with one mad desire. If Kenrick let her go! But steps approached; the door was thrown open. Marcella Maxwell came in timidly, very pale, the dark eyes shrinking from the sudden light of the drawing-room. She was bareheaded, and wore a long cloak of black lace over her white evening dress. Letty's flash of thought as she saw her was twofold: first, hatred of her beauty, then triumph in the evident nervousness with which her visitor approached her. Without making the slightest change of position, the mistress of the house spoke first. "Will you please tell me," she said, in her sharpest, thinnest voice, "to what I owe the honour of this visit?" Marcella paused half-way towards her hostess. "I read your letter to my husband," she said quietly, though her voice shook, "and I thought you would hardly refuse to let me speak to you about it." "Then perhaps you will sit down," said Letty, in the same voice; and she seated herself. If she had wished to heighten the effect of her reception by these small discourtesies she did not succeed. Rather, Marcella's self-possession returned under them. She looked round simply for a chair, brought one forward within speaking distance of her companion, moving once more, in her thin, tall grace, with all that unconscious dignity Letty had so often envied and admired from a distance. But neither dignity nor grace made any bar to the emotion that filled her. She bent forward, clasping her hands on her knee.