She knew that he saw Mrs. Jordan constantly, and was yet compelled to ignore it; she burned to know what passed between them, yet scorned to inquire. The news William Henry brought back with him of the prospects of the play seemed hardly of any consequence to her compared with matters on which he never spoke at all. What was it to her that Kemble was unsympathetic, dogged, and studiously apathetic in his rendering of Vortigern; that Phillimore as Horsus was more like a buffoon than a hero? What was it to her, on the other hand, that Mrs. Powell as Edmunda surpassed Mrs. Siddons herself? What she wished to know, and could not ask, was how that hussey Mrs. Jordan was behaving herself, not as Flavia in tights (though that idea was far from consolatory), but in her own proper person. Of one thing she felt convinced, that not content with seeing her Willie every day, this woman corresponded with him; that he received letters from her under that very roof. Else how was it that when the post now brought him missives in a hand that was strange to her, he would slip them into his pocket without a word of comment, and with an air of indifference that did not impose upon her for an instant? William Henry had now a little sitting-room of his own, and she noticed that when these letters arrived he remained in it longer alone than usual; reading them, no doubt, over and over, perhaps replying to them in the same fervid style in which (she felt sure) they were written, and possibly (for Margaret, though no poet like her Willie, had a lively imagination of her own) even kissing them. One morning the Epilogue to ‘Vortigern and Rowena’ arrived from Mr. Merry, and was discussed at breakfast-time word by word, as befitted so important a document. An hour afterwards, when William Henry had gone out, as Margaret was only too well convinced, to Drury Lane, Mr. Erin returned to the subject. ‘I don’t much like those concluding lines in the first part,’ he said— The scattered flowers he left, benignly save, Posthumous flowers; the garland of the grave. ‘It ran “benignly save,“ did it not, Madge?’ ‘I am not sure, uncle.’ ‘Then just go and get the thing out of Samuel’s room.’ Margaret went and looked about her for the manuscript in question. It was nowhere to be found. But in her researches she came upon another document spread out in the half-opened drawer of the writing-table; it was written in a delicate hand on large letter-paper, and it was almost impossible that she could avoid reading the commencement of it.