Launce Keymer had scarcely been twenty-four hours at home before the nursemaid, Doris King, who was under promise to do so, had intimated the fact by letter to Miss Hetty Blair. Other notes followed, in which Hetty was informed that her former lover was going about just as he had been in the habit of doing before he left home, as gay, as smiling, and apparently as free from care as ever he had been. And so, indeed, he was, for Launce never dreamt that Hetty either could or would trouble him further. When all was said and done, he looked upon it that he had escaped handsomely out of both his entanglements, and as the particulars in neither case had come to the knowledge of the little world in which he habitually lived and moved, it seemed to him that he was perfectly at liberty to revert to that pleasant, social, _dégagé_ mode of life to which all his inclinations tended, and of which unlimited and irresponsible flirtation formed an essential factor. Ethel Thursby had said to Hetty: “The service you have done me is greater than you know. Not only have you shown me the kind of man Launce Keymer is, but you have opened my eyes to something else. When he asked me to become his wife it was in the belief that I should one day inherit my aunts’ money, but within a few hours of his discovery that they had lost nearly all they were worth and that, consequently, there was no prospect of my inheriting anything, he left home suddenly and without coming to bid me goodbye, and from then till now no word of any kind has reached me from him. The reason of his silence is now made plain to me. He intends me to understand by it that he wishes our engagement to be considered as at an end—and so, indeed, from this hour it is.” These words recurred to Hetty again and again, and the oftener she thought them over the more clearly she saw that, instead of having, as she had hoped and intended, inflicted on her former lover an injury from which he would not readily recover, she had unwittingly rendered him an essential service by causing Miss Thursby of her own accord to break off an engagement towards the rupture of which he himself had already taken the first steps. The reflection was a mortifying one, and Hetty ground her sharp white teeth in impotent anger as often as it forced itself upon her. Then, one day, she bethought herself that two of Launce Keymer’s letters were still in her possession, which, as breathing a more ardent attachment and being studded with more terms of endearment, she had chosen from the others to place under her pillow at night and help to bring her happy dreams. “If I have failed to make him suffer in the way I intended,” she said to herself; “that is all the more reason why I should make him suffer in some other way.”