And in another instant she burst into the room, and stood there, her tear-stained face convulsed with the horror of finding him in such company. THE THIRTEENTH TRUMP XIV. "Your adversary having thus secured the lead with the last trump, you will be powerless to prevent the bringing-in of the long suit." ROUGH'S _Guide to Whist._ "What! thinkest thou that utterly in vain Jove is my sire, and in despite my will That thou canst mock me with thy beauty still?" _Story of Cupid and Psyche._ Leander, when he wrote his distracted appeal to Matilda, took it for granted that she had recognized the statue for something of a supernatural order, and this, combined with his perplexed state of mind, caused him to be less explicit than he might have been in referring to the goddess's ill-timed appearance. But, unfortunately, as will probably have been already anticipated, the only result of this reticence was, that Matilda saw in his letter an abject entreaty for her consent to his marriage with Ada Parkinson, to avoid legal proceedings, and, under this misapprehension, she wrote the line that abandoned all claims upon him, and then went on with her accounts, which were not so neatly kept that day as usual. What she felt most keenly in Leander's conduct was, that he should have placed the ring, which to all intent was her own, upon the finger of another. She could not bear to think of so unfeeling an act, and yet she thought of it all through the long day, as she sat, outwardly serene, at her high desk, while her attendants at her side made up sprays for dances and wreaths for funerals from the same flowers. And at last she felt herself urged to a course which, in her ordinary mind, she would have shrunk from as a lowering of her personal dignity: she would go and see her rival, and insist that this particular humiliation should be spared her. The ring was not Leander's to dispose of--at least, to dispose of thus; it was not right that any but herself should wear it; and, though the token could never now be devoted to its rightful use, she wanted to save it from what, in her eyes, was a kind of profanation. She would not own it to herself, but there was a motive stronger than all this--the desire to relieve her breast of some of the indignation which was choking her, and of which her pride forbade any betrayal to Leander himself. This other woman had supplanted her; but she should be made to feel the wrong she had done, and her triumphs should be tempered with shame, if she were capable of such a sensation. Matilda knew very well that the ring was not hers, and she wanted it no longer; but, then, it was Miss Tweddle's, and she would claim it in her name.