But that he might have done a large amount of damage, that his soldiers might have pillaged right and left, that villages and towns might have been destroyed, that widespread loss and misery might have been inflicted, of all this there can be small question, at least as to the bare possibility. These fears, however, were now at an end. Napoleon’s career of conquest on land continued unchecked; but at sea the flag of Great Britain reigned supreme. Nelson’s body lay beneath St. Paul’s Cathedral: but before he went he had done his work. He had saved his country from the iron heel of Napoleon. So Mrs. Fairbank’s letter contained no further descriptions of invasion scares, such as she would have had to write two or three years earlier, though it did contain certain references to the Emperor, not too cautiously worded for a letter on its road to France. Some past hopes of a peace between England and France, now at an end, were alluded to also. “I’ll read it aloud to you, may I?” asked Roy again, when Captain Ivor had made his appearance, refreshed and smartened as to the outer man, and had been made to sit down to a hastily-prepared meal, to which he failed to do justice. “And,” Roy added, recalling Lucille’s words, “you can get on the sofa, and have a rest.” Ivor declined to pose as an invalid, and submitted only to being installed in the Colonel’s large arm-chair, while Roy plunged into Mrs. Fairbank’s epistle, wading through it on the whole perseveringly, though not without suggestions of skippings. “It’s written, ‘Bath, August 4th, 1806,’—ever so long ago,” he remarked as a preliminary. “But she didn’t get it all done in one day—not near. I can leave out the other dates. They don’t matter. “‘MY DEAR SIR,—Though ’tis somewhat hopeless work writing, under the present aspect of affairs, I will send another letter, wishing that it may by some means reach you in safety. We still look out perpetually, with Constant Anxiety, for any sort of news of yourselves, which indeed but seldom arrives. These passing years are tru’ly melancholy to think upon. Molly is now fifteen, and has not seen Roy for a space of three years and more! Who could have thought——’ O I say, can’t I skip this? She does go on so. Well, I won’t, if you’d rather not; but it’s no good, you know. ‘Who could have thought it, my dear Sir, when you and your wife unhappily decided to make that doleful excursion to France, intending to stay but one fortnight, which resulted in this continued separation? Alas, how little man knows ever what lies Before him, in the Future!’ But what’s the good of her saying all that?