"I've never dared to write to you before, Clairy. Frank watches me so; but, though I don't come, I think lots about you, and I shall never forget what a dear, good thing you were that night. Good-bye. We must be separate for a bit, till that bother's all forgotten, but don't you fidget; I'm going to be so good now." Claire was reading the note that had come to her, she knew not how, for the second time, wondering how a woman--her sister--could be so utterly heartless; and, after leaving her to bear the brunt of Sir Harry Payne's shameless accusation, treat it all as such a mere trifle. Claire held the letter in her hand, with her spirits very low, and a bitter, despairing look was in her eyes as she sat gazing before her, thinking that no greater trouble could come to her now. Richard Linnell had just passed the house, and though ever since the night of the "At Home," she had shrunk away and rigidly kept from noticing him, the one pleasure she had longed for was to see the grave, wistful look he was in the habit of directing at the window. Now, he had gone by without raising his eyes. It was the most cruel pang of all. He might have had faith in her, even if she had rejected his suit, and told him that it was hopeless in the extreme. Her cheeks burned as she thought of Cora Dean with her Juno-like face and her manifest liking for Richard Linnell. "What is it to me?" she said to herself; and her tears fell fast upon the letter she held in her hand, and she did not hear her father enter the drawing-room, nor see him glance quickly from her in the flesh to the sweetly innocent face of his favourite child, smiling down upon him from the young Italian artist's canvas. Then he caught sight of the letter, and saw that she was weeping. An angry flash came into his eyes; the mincing dandyism gave place to a sharp angular rigidity, and stepping quickly across the intervening space that separated him from his child, he was about to take the note from her hands. Claire uttered a faint cry of alarm, started from the sofa, and hastily thrust the folded paper into her pocket. "That letter," he said, stamping his foot, "give me that letter." "No, no, I cannot, father," she cried, with a look of terror at his worn and excited face. "I insist," he cried. "I will not allow these clandestine correspondences to be carried on. Give me the letter." "Father, I cannot," she said firmly. "Am I to take it from you by force?" he cried. "Am I, a gentleman who has struggled all these years to make himself the model from which society is to take its stand, who has striven so hard for his children, to be disgraced by you?" No answer. "Heaven knows how I have struggled, and it seems that two of my children must have been born with some base blood in their veins, and to be for ever my disgrace." Claire raised her eyes to his full of pitying wonder.