She laid down the brush and leaned her chin on her clasped hands.... Even now she could not understand what had made her take the cigars. She had always been alive to the value of her inherited scruples: her reasoned opinions were unusually free, but with regard to the things one couldn’t reason about she was oddly tenacious. And yet she had taken Streffy’s cigars! She had taken them--yes, that was the point--she had taken them for Nick, because the desire to please him, to make the smallest details of his life easy and agreeable and luxurious, had become her absorbing preoccupation. She had committed, for him, precisely the kind of little baseness she would most have scorned to commit for herself; and, since he hadn’t instantly felt the difference, she would never be able to explain it to him. She stood up with a sigh, shook out her loosened hair, and glanced around the great frescoed room. The maid-servant had said something about the Signora’s having left a letter for her; and there it lay on the writing-table, with her mail and Nick’s; a thick envelope addressed in Ellie’s childish scrawl, with a glaring “Private” dashed across the corner. “What on earth can she have to say, when she hates writing so,” Susy mused. She broke open the envelope, and four or five stamped and sealed letters fell from it. All were addressed, in Ellie’s hand, to Nelson Vanderlyn Esqre; and in the corner of each was faintly pencilled a number and a date: one, two, three, four--with a week’s interval between the dates. “Goodness--” gasped Susy, understanding. She had dropped into an armchair near the table, and for a long time she sat staring at the numbered letters. A sheet of paper covered with Ellie’s writing had fluttered out among them, but she let it lie; she knew so well what it would say! She knew all about her friend, of course; except poor old Nelson, who didn’t, But she had never imagined that Ellie would dare to use her in this way. It was unbelievable... she had never pictured anything so vile.... The blood rushed to her face, and she sprang up angrily, half minded to tear the letters in bits and throw them all into the fire. She heard her husband’s knock on the door between their rooms, and swept the dangerous packet under the blotting-book. “Oh, go away, please, there’s a dear,” she called out; “I haven’t finished unpacking, and everything’s in such a mess.” Gathering up Nick’s papers and letters, she ran across the room and thrust them through the door. “Here’s something to keep you quiet,” she laughed, shining in on him an instant from the threshold. She turned back feeling weak with shame. Ellie’s letter lay on the floor: reluctantly she stooped to pick it up, and one by one the expected phrases sprang out at her.