I had paid the bill. I wrote the check and despatched it the night I found it, and now the receipt also lay beside the letters. I tied them together and sealed the bundle with Augustus's seal. I put the receipted bill with them, and enclosed the whole packet in another envelope, and addressed it to Lady Grenellen. I had not answered her letter of sympathy. This would be my answer. A thick skin is a fortunate gift, it appears, and one I had thought of extreme rareness in the class to which she belongs. What was my surprise to receive a gushing letter of thanks by return of post! My husband and she had been such friends, she said, and he had helped her before so kindly out of her difficulties, and it was too good of me to have paid this bill--she could see by the date I must have paid it--and it all was too sad, and she hoped we should meet later on, perhaps at Harley! Her own husband was coming home, slightly wounded, she added. Had I been in a laughing mood I should have laughed aloud at the effrontery of the whole thing. Well, perhaps it was better so. As far as I am concerned the whole incident shall be forgotten--a memory of Augustus sunk into the past. And so January passed and February began. It seems in life that things all come together. One's days go on smoothly, uneventfully, for months, and then, one after another, a series of startling, unusual events occurs, which changes the course of the peaceful river. At the end of February--I was still at Ledstone, and my daily communications from Amelia told me my poor mother-in-law was still a happy idiot--another telegram came to me--this time it was addressed to grandmamma--to grandmamma at the cottage! The very outside startled me. It was long, and from an unknown firm of lawyers in America, to say that papa had died out in the West, leaving me and grandmamma a perfectly colossal fortune--all made in the space of three years, it must have been. I seemed past feeling any grief. Papa was a shadow, a strange flash in my life for so long a time now. I was perfectly unacquainted with business, and had no more idea than a child what I should have to do about this. I wished I had a friend to advise me. Where could I turn? I thought of Antony. For the first time since my widowhood I let my thoughts turn to him. He would give me any advice I wanted, but then--no, he had had the good taste never even to write to me. There was time enough for our meeting. I would not push fate--I, who had been a widow only two months. The only thing there seemed for me to do was to start for America immediately, and, after taking paid advice--one gets very good advice by paying for it--Roy, McGreggor, my lawyer, and I left England one cold and bleak March morning. IV