Meanwhile her own note was like lead on the heart of its recipient, who had made sure that some message, some bequest, would come to her from William Massarene. She knew the man so little, despite her intelligence and worldly wisdom, that she had actually believed that he might provide for the restoration to her, at his death, of her own and Beaumont’s signatures, or would leave her some assurance that they were destroyed. As it was, in the absence of any indication, she could not tell that they might not at any moment be found by his daughter or his executors. Every moment of these weeks was a torture to her. She could not sleep an hour at night without anodynes. It was now the beginning of July: the height of the season. She had to act in pastoral plays, keep stalls at bazaars, go to garden-parties, dinner-parties, marriages, _déjeuners_, flower-shows, Primrose gatherings, and be seen once at least at a Drawing-room. She did not dare give in, or go away, or pretend to be ill, because she was afraid that the world might suspect that she was worried by the consequences of Massarene’s death. These days during which she knew that his heiress must be searching amongst his papers, reading his memoranda, and sorting his correspondence, were the most horrible of her life. She felt stretched on a rack from morning till night. Outwardly she was lovely, impertinent, careless, gay, as ever, and people wondered whom she would marry; but her mental life was one of the most restless conjecture, the most agonized dread. As the days became weeks, and she heard nothing of any discovery made at Harrenden House, she began to grow quieter, she began to feel reassured. The signatures no doubt had been burnt. She persuaded herself that they had certainly been burnt. She did not dream that Beaumont’s receipt and the type-written lines she herself had signed had been enclosed, without a word, in the sealed letter which was lying awaiting her brother at his rooms in Bruton street. The same night that he had returned from Paris, William Massarene, who never left till to-morrow that which should be done to-day, had put them in that envelope, had addressed and sealed them. “Now if I die my lady will remember me,” he had thought. “She’ll wish she hadn’t called me Billy, and told me lies about the Bird rooms.” In his own way at that time he was fiercely in love with her; but his passion did not make him forget or forgive. It was a posthumous vengeance which he thus arranged; but it was a diabolical and ingenious one.