On the day of our visit to Mother Carey I wrote to Lord Skene, giving him the full particulars of that interview, of the circumstances which had led _to_, and of the conclusions to be drawn _from_ it. How he might choose to regard those conclusions, whether in his former sceptical spirit, or in one more accommodating, could only now, I said, affect the temper of my resolution, not its inexorableness. He might make my purpose a dutiful or a rebellious one; he could not turn me from it. The inference to be drawn from that confession, I insisted, was too plain to be mistaken by any not wilfully blind; and the friends who had taken up my cause for me were at least sufficiently convinced of its justice to be determined to spare no trouble nor expense in the effort to secure me its last essential confirmation. I put the whole case to him in a frank, unimpassioned, and perfectly respectful manner; but I expressed through all an insistence on my right to act independently in my own behalf, should he still see fit to refuse me his countenance in the venture. And with that I ended. His answer, when it came, was courteous, unconvinced, _entêté_. He was obliged to me, he said, for my information regarding a certain unscrupulous transaction, inasmuch as it furnished him with an effective retort upon the insolence of a scoundrel, should that scoundrel ever have the effrontery to attempt a new move in what was virtually a lost game to him. For the rest, he had not changed in his opinion that it would be the best wisdom to let sleeping dogs lie, and, for me, to reconsider his suggestion of a compromise, lest “aiming at all, I lost all.” In the meantime, he had to inform me that Mr Dalston--aware somehow, no doubt, of a threatening turn in events--had disappeared from the neighbourhood, leaving his lady in sole possession of the Lone Farm; and, consequently, that Lady Skene, induced by circumstances and fortified by my revelation, had been persuaded into reconsidering her resolve to renounce the world, and was now in actual fact returned to her duties as wife and mother at Evercreech, which was after all the end of all ends, so far as he was concerned. I said to myself, with a bitter laugh, as I put the letter into the fire, that I could quite believe it. It was the end of all ends to him--had always been, and would always be. And then I broke the seal of another letter which represented the end of all ends to me. Perhaps I was inconsistent in blaming him. Was I less infatuated myself? I would have disputed fifty successions that seemed to bar me from that one peaceful possession.