It was empty, the window still stood open on to the terrace, and the air was full of the pungent smell of the flowers without. Rose Lyndwood seated himself at the table where Miss Chressham had written, earlier that evening, the letter whose fragments were now being swirled down the stream into the open country. He picked up a pen and slowly mended it, pulled out a sheet of Susannah's gilt-edged paper, and paused. What had happened since he had left London that morning--his meeting with his cousin, the fierce disappointment and anger of Marius, the foolish, bitter reproaches of the Countess--had hardly touched his real feelings, and, personally, moved him not at all. He had endured these scenes, disdainful of them; he knew that neither his mother nor Marius had ever attempted to avert the ruin that so overwhelmed them, and that they knew nothing of his real position. To both he was a stranger in all things save blood, and now as he sat alone, his thoughts were where they had been on the ride from London, with the people and things of his own world, though through all was the stinging recollection of his brother's sneers and his mother's tears. Presently he began to write, slowly but without hesitation. "MADAM,--You will remember that I acquainted you with the fact that my affairs approached a crisis, and that I considered accepting the appointment at Venice as a retreat from a life my fortunes would no longer support. You know what other hope I dared to cherish--believe that I have ever held dear the assurances you once gave me, and that in writing this I taste fully the bitterness of poverty. "I cannot go to Venice, since both my lady and Marius, my brother, find me at fault in this entanglement of my fortunes, and 'tis but decent that I should strive to repair losses that affect them, since they demand it of me. "More 'tis difficult to say on paper, yet I have no fear that you will not understand since we never found it hard to comprehend one another. When last you wrote you said that you were being pressed in the matter of your betrothal to your cousin Francis--he is one to whom I should have given my esteem in other circumstances, and one whom, even as it is, I cannot hate, though his fortune is more brilliant than mine----" The Earl broke off and stared out at the night with darkening eyes, then he signed his name and the date. Without reading the letter through he folded and addressed it to: MISS SELINA BOYLE, Bristol. As he finished he looked round, for he heard the door softly open. "Susannah," he said. His intonation held welcome; he half smiled. Miss Chressham crossed the room; within a little distance of her cousin's chair she paused; he was again gazing out at the night, and she saw only his back, the blue ribbon at his neck, and the long smooth curls that hung beneath it. "What have they said to you?" she asked. "That which I might have expected."