Now, if any one could tell me where Iris was to be found, Cherry-Marvel was that man. Cherry-Marvel knew, of course, everybody, and he knew everything about everybody ... “of course it’s absurd to suppose that Alice, with her intelligence, which I am positive makes its full appeal to you--it is absurd to suppose that Alice could for one _moment_ have thought that her husband, whom of course you know as well as I do, would divorce her for going to Brighton with Cubby Tyrell, because, as I was pointing out to her sister only the other day, for one thing no decent man, and I am sure you will agree with me about this, would care to let it be known that his wife had ever gone to Brighton, and for another, and this, of course, is a Biblical detail which I am sure that you will grasp at once, Cubby Tyrell, who is a very intimate friend of mine, has been allowed, in spite of having been married twice, to remain a member of the Celibates Club....” At this time I hadn’t the remotest idea as to where Iris was or how she did. I had not seen her since the night of her brother’s death; and had been permitted to gather from Hilary that he knew as little as I did of her whereabouts. Secret she had always been in her absences, Hilary said, or, rather careless, but now she seemed positively in hiding. She had, a few weeks after that terrible night, written me one long letter: from some place near Rome, from a draughty house, so she wrote, on a hill of strangled olives. There was no address on the notepaper, and this, she wrote, was because she did not want me or any one to write to her. “Please,” she added to that. Her letter was presumably in answer to two of mine addressed to the care of Mrs. Oden of Montpellier Square, but she was at the pains to excuse it on the ground that she and I were tied together--“no, tied apart!”--by a bond, the existence of which I would never, never know. Well! It was, you can see, a feverish, mysterious letter; and made how much more mysterious by that almost illegible, pencilled scrawl! There were whole sentences on the first few pages which I could not make out at all, which I made almost blind guesses at, while at some I could not even contrive so much. “It is your fault, my friend. You paved the road up which I raced in chase of the Blue Bird. Yours was the appointed dark finger in the darkness. May God forgive you, for I can’t. I will try, but I think I can’t. There is a waterfall of fire....” Sheets upon sheets of it, that letter is before me now, and still I am unable to decipher whole sentences from that maze of pencil-marks on the thin Italian paper. There was one that stared at me, shocked me, in the middle of the second page--“I may hate you”--but I could not, do what I would, make out the words above or below.