This letter brought tears to the eyes of the woman to whom it was addressed, although she was but very rarely moved to such emotion. “Why should we be strangers,” she thought, “because of the sins or the crimes of others?” She drew the check which he had sent her on his bankers, but she gave, at the same time, a commission to a famous art agent in Paris to buy back the Dutch and Flemish pictures of the Faldon Collection from the dealers who had purchased them, and on no account to let her name appear in connection with the purchase. Why should an honest and gallant gentleman lose heirlooms because his sister had been as venal as any courtezan of ancient Rome or modern Paris? How she would be able ever to restore them to him she did not know; meantime, she saved them from the hammer. She thought that she would leave them to him by will, in case of her own death, with reversion to the National Gallery if he refused to accept them, and to restore them to their places at Faldon. CHAPTER XXXV. At the head of a Norwegian fjord, where the tents of a gay and aristocratic party of travellers had been pitched on the green sward for a merry month or two of fishing and shooting and canoeing, the postbags were brought up the valley on the back of a stout mountain pony one fine cold day at the end of the sporting season. Sir Henry Bassenthwaite, leader and host of the expedition, was a newly-made baronet, a very rich brewer, one of those persons who bear with them a trail of electric light and a cloud of gold dust as they rush through unsophisticated lands which they annoy by their impertinence, and console by their expenditure. Sir Henry took the letter-bags, untied them, unsealed them, and distributed their contents to his party. “A round dozen for you, Duchess!” he cried gaily, as he held them above his head. The Duchess of Otterbourne, who was seated on the turf leaning against a boulder, grey with lichens, amongst the cloud-berry with her rod and kreel beside her, and a little court of men round her, received her letters with that quickening of the pulse under apprehension which was frequent with her since she had been taught to tremble by William Massarene. The dread of a posthumous retaliation was always upon her: she never now saw a closed envelope without an inward shiver of apprehension. Instinctively she rose and walked to a little distance with her back to her companions, and stood still on the edge of the foaming, crystal-clear, noisy river into which a little while before she had been throwing her line. She broke the seals with unsteady fingers. She hastily scanned assurances from Whiteleaf that the children were well. Then she took up the rest of the correspondence, and her heart stood still as she saw a large packet sealed with six large black seals and addressed to her in a handwriting which she knew at a glance to be Katherine Massarene’s. There must be some message from the dead at last!