How lovely lunching alone once again! Somehow a visitor always begins to send my spirits down and down and down after the first two or three days. When I saw her off yesterday I felt I couldn’t have stood even Alice much longer. How different we are! If Alice knew that I wasn’t going to France till Monday, she would worry about my loneliness just as she would worry over my neuralgia or my influenza. I expect that at this very moment she is writing a long letter to Sainte Véronique on the old text--begging me to go into a smaller house, and to look out for a companion, or to spend the winter with them. And I would make a large bet that she’ll redeliver her solemn warning about my solitariness making me morbid. Yet there may be a little in it. Who knows? If Susan doesn’t stay, I may be awfully glad to go to Alice’s for a month or two after all. Now for Susan and her precious letter. _After dinner_. Alice is right. Solitude is a mistake. If I hadn’t the diary-habit, I should explode like a shell into little bits. Still, for Susan’s sake and her incredible adorer’s, it’s a good thing there’s no one here, not even Alice. If there was anybody at hand to listen, I don’t see how I could contrive to hold my tongue. As it is, it only relieves me a very little to scribble it all down in this book. No wonder Susan under-toasted the toast and over-brewed the tea! I don’t wonder any longer even at her heroics and melodramatics while she was doing my hair. When she brought me her letter, addressed in a strong and distinguished hand to Miss Susan Briggs, The Grange, Traxelby, I saw at a glance that we hadn’t to deal with a village bumpkin. Indeed, when I took the sheet of thick, good paper from the envelope and saw that it was embossed with the heading "Ruddington Towers," I wasn’t surprised. I concluded instantly that Susan’s pursuer was one of the three young artists of whom I’ve heard till I’m tired to death of them--the artists Lord Ruddington is said to have found starving in a Chelsea studio. I forget whether they’ve come down here to paint the hall or the chapel. "Susan," I said, meaning to let her down gently, "I hope it isn’t one of those young artists from London? An artist is interesting; but he’s too impulsive, too vain, too unreliable. I hope----" "Oh, no, Miss," said Susan hurriedly. "It isn’t any of the young gentlemen that’s doing the painting and decorating." "Whoever he is," I answered, "he makes himself at home with Lord Ruddington’s best stationery. Let me see." I turned over the sheet and looked for the signature. Half-way down the third page I found it. The writer had signed himself with the single word "Ruddington." "Susan," I demanded almost roughly, "why didn’t you tell me about this at once?" "If you please, Miss----" "There’s no if you please about it. Why, this creature, whoever he may be, is pretending to be Lord Ruddington." Susan burst out crying, suddenly and copiously.