"Well, but aren't you a tease, though!" said Essie delightedly, as this was repeated while they came in to where the registered letter awaited them on the breakfast-table. "Aren't you a fair tease! 'If I want to!' Why, aren't I simply dying to just! I'm simply bursting to tell Mother every single minute. Isn't a secret a caution though--just like when you've got a hole in your dress and think everybody's looking at it. Oh, isn't it funny how you do when you have, though? Let's have a laugh!" The laughter brought them to the registered letter and to Essie's exclamation at it; and then, as she handled the packet, readdressed in Mr. Bickers' clerkly script, and gave it to Mr. Wriford: "Feels to me as if some one's sent you a pocket-handkerchief," said Essie. "That shows you don't know what a honeymoon ticket feels like," said Mr. Wriford and fingered the bundle of banknotes within their parchment cover. "Listen to the crinkling. That's the confetti they always pack it in." Essie was highly amused. "Hasn't being engaged made you different, though! You're jolly as anything down here. Aren't I glad!" "It's you that's made me different," Mr. Wriford declared; and "Oo-oo!" cried Essie at what went with this assurance. "Oo-oo! Look out, here's Mother coming." Mrs. Bickers' appearance, and then all the jolly chatter at breakfast, and afterwards the morning bathe and the rest of the usual programme of Whitecliffe's delights, caused the mysterious registered letter to go--as she would have said--clean out of Essie's head. Mr. Wriford, when he had a moment alone, opened it and read it, and found within it, thrice repeated, a phrase that intensely he chorused as he put letter and the twenty ten-pound notes in his pockets and looked upon the immediate plans that now were all ripe for execution. II "Your return to life" was this phrase that the literary agent three times repeated in the course of his enthusiastic delight and surprise at news at last of missing Mr. Wriford. He gave some astonishing figures of the sales of Mr. Wriford's books. He put forward what appeared to him the most engaging of the contracts which publishers were longing to make. He ended with How soon would Mr. Wriford run up to town for a talk? or should Mr. Lessingham come down? "Don't let your return to life--now that at last you have made it--give me a moment's longer silence than you can help."