“Will she read it?” muttered Lord Francis to himself, as he looked at the closely-covered pages of the letter in his hand. “Oh, if she would only believe, if she would only let me know what she really feels. It is maddening to be placed in such a position, to see her playing fast and loose with reputation, to have no more right to kiss her lips or touch her hand than the veriest stranger. To be here now, to-night, the same roof covering us, not half a dozen walls dividing us, and yet not dare----” He broke off abruptly, his eyes grew dark with stormy passions. The pain and fever of aroused memories throbbed wildly in his heart, and thrilled his veins anew with love and longing, as once her light step and sweet low laugh had thrilled him. “Fenella! wife!” his heart cried. “O God! are our lives to be forever wrecked and spoiled by this miserable folly? Child, surely you know I love you, that all other women are but as shadows to me. Oh, how my heart aches for you! Surely you feel it--you can’t have forgotten--you _can’t_!” He looked again at the letter, then placed it in an envelope and sealed it hastily. “I will go to her--I know her room. I can slip it under the door if--if she is asleep; but, perhaps----” He did not finish that thought audibly. Only opened the door and looked down the dark and silent corridor beyond. How still it was. He heard a clock striking, somewhere in the silence, two hours after midnight. A strange chill--a feeling of half shame, half uncertainty--held him there on the threshold. There seemed something guilty and wrong about the simple action he intended. “To think,” he muttered to himself, “that a man should actually feel there was something improper in leaving a letter at his own wife’s door. Yet, if I were seen, who would believe it?” He drew the door after him. The whole corridor was in darkness. At the further end stood a marble statue surrounded by tall palms. He had noticed it already during the day. The room next to it was the one he had seen Lady Francis enter. He moved softly down the long passage. Suddenly he paused, and shrank back into a doorway close at hand. That door beside the statue and the palms was thrown open; a slender white figure stood revealed by the light within the room. At the same moment another figure--the figure of a man--advanced rapidly, and spoke in a low, hurried voice. The watcher stood as if turned to stone. He saw the woman retreat backward step by step into the room she had just quitted. He saw the man attempt to follow her. The door shut; again all was darkness and silence. For one hateful, throbbing moment, that seemed to hold a lifetime of agony in its passage, Lord Francis stood there, gazing at the closed door. At last, with trembling limbs and face bloodless as the dead, he staggered back to his own room, and sank down on the chair where he had written that letter, with its pleading for love and reconciliation.