I have shown him that I can very well _take care of myself_. I knew the _odious thing_ the first moment I set eyes on him, though he had forgotten me. Years ago I met him, and I remember he was equally _rude and tips_——” Here the letter was torn. Beyond “_tips_” it did not go. But that was enough, wasn’t it? To this woman I had offered a gentle and manly, I may say a kind and tender heart—I had offered four hundred a year in funded property, besides my house in Devonshire Street, Bloomsbury—and she preferred _Edward_, forsooth, at the sign of the Gallipot: and may ten thousand pestles smash my brains! You may fancy what a night I had after reading that scrap. I promise you I did not sleep much. I heard the hours toll as I kept vigil. I lay amidst shattered capitals, broken shafts of the tumbled palace which I had built in imagination—oh! how bright and stately! I sate amongst the ruins of my own happiness, surrounded by the murdered corpses of innocent-visioned domestic joys. Tick—tock! Moment after moment I heard on the clock the clinking footsteps of wakeful grief. I fell into a doze towards morning, and dreamed that I was dancing with Glorvina, when I woke with a start, finding Bedford arrived with my shaving water, and opening the shutters. When he saw my haggard face he wagged his head. “You _have_ read it, I see, sir,” says he. “Yes, Dick,” groaned I, out of bed, “I have swallowed it.” And I laughed I may say a fiendish laugh. “And now I have taken it, not poppy nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups in his shop (hang him) will be able to medicine me to sleep for some time to come!” “She has no heart, sir. I don’t think she cares for t’other chap much,” groans the gloomy butler. “She can’t, after having known _us_”—and my companion in grief, laying down my hot-water jug, retreats.