When the servants had gone to bed and the house was quiet, the lawyer locked himself into his dining-room, where a snug little mahogany table with a suggestive load of comforts stood ready by the arm of his easy-chair. He sat down and took from his pocket the letter he had carried about all the afternoon, reading it through carefully. As he refreshed himself with the port he had poured out he counted again on his fingers. But there was no use in counting; he could come to no conclusion, for it rested purely with accident to decide how soon Captain Somerville’s communication should reach Gilbert. If there were no delays, if he were at Madrid or at some place within reach of it, if he made up his mind on the spot, if he could find means to start immediately and met no obstacle on the way--it was possible he might arrive within a few days of the wedding. Then, everything would depend upon Cecilia; and it would need almost superhuman courage for a woman to draw back in such circumstances. He had done a great thing in possessing himself of the paper he held. Little as he knew her, he suspected her to be a person of some character, and there was no guessing what step she might take, were she given time to think. ‘Hope for the best and prepare for the worst.’ He was doing this throughly. He emptied his glass, and, with the gold pencil on his fob-chain, made a rough note in his pocket-book of the contents of Somerville’s letter; then he crushed the epistle into a ball and stuffed it into the red heart of the coals with the poker, holding it down till it was no more than a flutter of black ash. This over, he wrote Fordyce an account of what he had done. ‘I am not really apprehensive,’ he concluded, ‘but, hurry the wedding, if you can do so on any pretext, and never say that Alexander Barclay did not do his best for you.’