Far from it! The parcel contained only the half-used packet of mourning envelopes and a letter. It was a comfort to see that the epistle was by another and an apparently saner hand. The letter was not very long. It began— “MRS. CHALLONER,—The trunk has come to hand. We had to pay a man sixpence extra for bringing it up. Your letter and post-office order have come. We see you pay only for the current month. Considering our niece was wore out at your place and had to leave through illness caused there, we think you might have done a little more. Our niece says these envelopes don’t belong to her, and she doesn’t want to take away anything that isn’t hers. She says she never knew such goings on as there were at your place, and if the pore dear had gone out of her mind it wouldn’t have been no wonder. Maybe it is someone else as is out of their mind. Our niece has got a little means of her own, and needn’t go to service except where she is valued. She won’t go anywhere till she’s got back the strength she lost in your place, and she won’t come back to you on no account. “Yours, “SARAH ANN MICKLEWRATH.” At another time the falseness, the selfishness, the greed, the utter injustice of that letter would have pained Lucy. It scarcely hurt her now. She showed it to Miss Latimer, and Mr. Somerset, and Mrs. May, and they were all indignant; but as for Lucy, she only smiled dimly. “We have done all we can,” she said. “We can’t do any more. And we must not judge these Micklewraths too harshly. We do not know how sane and reasonable Clementina may appear to them, just as she did to us. I should not have been readily incredulous of any story Clementina might have told me about any of our tradespeople or neighbours.” It was a suspicious circumstance that Clementina’s nearest relations at Inverslain preserved a dead silence so far as the little house with the verandah was concerned. It appeared, however, that they wrote to Mrs. Bray’s Rachel. She forwarded their letter to Mrs. Challoner. It, too, was brief and guarded, but was quite different in its tone. It was written by Clementina’s brother, who deplored the trouble his sister had given everybody—“precisely as she did when she left the Highlands without telling us where she was going or what she meant to do. She is an excitable woman,” he added, “who dwells on things too much and takes violent fancies.” His conclusion was that, “as her aunt and uncle at Hull had taken her in—which was more than he and his wife would dare do, owing to Clementina’s temper—he hoped they would look after her, and she might quiet down after a bit.” Poor Rachel was quite self-accusatory at the sad failure of her “introduction,” though really it was hard to see how she could blame herself, since her recommendation had not gone one whit beyond very good and reasonable grounds, known to herself. She ended her letter by saying—