His voice dropped. He remained gazing absently into the fire. ‘Dear Otto’--said Constance softly--‘you have forgiven him?’ He smiled. ‘What does that matter? _Have you?_’ His eager eyes searched her face. She faltered under them. ‘He doesn’t care whether I have or not.’ At that he laughed out. ‘Doesn’t he? I say, did you ask us both to come--on purpose--that afternoon?--in the garden?’ She was silent. ‘It was bold of you!’ he said, in the same laughing tone. ‘But it’s answered. Unless, of course, I bore him to death. I talk a lot of nonsense--I can’t help it--and he bears it. And he says hard, horrid things, sometimes--and my blood boils--and I bear it. And I expect he wants to break off a hundred times a day--and so do I. Yet here we stay. And it’s _you_’--he raised his head deliberately--‘it’s _you_ that are really at the bottom of it.’ Constance rose trembling from her chair. ‘Don’t say any more, dear Otto. I didn’t mean any harm. I--I was so sorry for you both.’ He laughed again. ‘You’ve got to marry him!’ he said triumphantly. ‘There!--you may go now--But you’ll come again soon. I know you will!’ She seemed to slip, to melt, out of the room. But he had a last vision of flushed cheeks, and half-reproachful eyes. (_To be continued._) FOOTNOTES: [11] Copyright, 1915, by Mrs. Humphry Ward in the United States of America. _TO THE EDITOR OF THE ‘CORNHILL.’_ Dear Sir,--If it gives Mr. Russell any pleasure to accuse me of ‘living in a happy remoteness from affairs,’ and of having ‘only just awakened from a slumber which seems to have lasted longer than that of Rip Van Winkle,’ it would be cruel of me to object. But the proof of my guilt, it seems, is to be found in the article I wrote in the CORNHILL on ‘The Duke of Wellington and Miss J.’ That article, Mr. Russell thinks, proves that I had only just discovered Miss J. and her correspondence with the Duke. As a matter of fact I have been familiar with the volume published by Mr. T. Fisher Unwin for more than twenty years, and it must be fifteen years ago since I wrote an article on the subject in an Australian magazine. But Mr. Russell himself thinks the letters of Miss J. so little known, and so very interesting, that he himself expends another article on them, three months later than mine, and taking exactly the same view of them! It seems clear that there are two Rip Van Winkles--one in England and one in Australia: and the English Van Winkle is even drowsier, and wakes later, than his Australian kinsman.