While she was out, he sat twisting his moustache. She came back along the hall talking madly to herself in French. Having been much impressed by Sarah Bernhardt’s “Dame aux Camelias” and “Adrienne Lecouvreur,” Lettie had caught something of the weird tone of this great actress, and her raillery and mockery came out in little wild waves. She laughed at him, and at herself, and at men in general, and at love in particular. Whatever he said to her, she answered in the same mad clatter of French, speaking high and harshly. The sound was strange and uncomfortable. There was a painful perplexity in his brow, such as I often perceived afterwards, a sense of something hurting, something he could not understand. “Well, well, well, well!” she exclaimed at last. “We must be mad sometimes, or we should be getting aged, Hein?” “I wish I could understand,” he said plaintively. “Poor dear!” she laughed. “How sober he is! And will you really go? They will think we’ve given you no supper, you look so sad.” “I have supped—full——” he began, his eyes dancing with a smile as he ventured upon a quotation. He was very much excited. “Of horrors!” she cried completing it. “Now that is worse than anything I have given you.” “Is it?” he replied, and they smiled at each other. “Far worse,” she answered. They waited in suspense for some moments. He looked at her. “Good-bye,” she said, holding out her hand. Her voice was full of insurgent tenderness. He looked at her again, his eyes flickering. Then he took her hand. She pressed his fingers, holding them a little while. Then ashamed of her display of feeling, she looked down. He had a deep cut across his thumb. “What a gash!” she exclaimed, shivering, and clinging a little tighter to his fingers before she released them. He gave a little laugh. “Does it hurt you?” she asked very gently. He laughed again—“No!” he said softly, as if his thumb were not worthy of consideration. They smiled again at each other, and, with a blind movement, he broke the spell and was gone. CHAPTER IV THE FATHER Autumn set in, and the red dahlias which kept the warm light alive in their bosoms so late into the evening died in the night, and the morning had nothing but brown balls of rottenness to show. They called me as I passed the post-office door in Eberwich one evening, and they gave me a letter for my mother. The distorted, sprawling handwriting perplexed me with a dim uneasiness; I put the letter away, and forgot it. I remembered it later in the evening, when I wished to recall something to interest my mother. She looked at the handwriting, and began hastily and nervously to tear open the envelope; she held it away from her in the light of the lamp, and with eyes drawn half closed, tried to scan it. So I found her spectacles, but she did not speak her thanks, and her hand trembled. She read the short letter quickly; then she sat down, and read it again, and continued to look at it. “What is it mother?” I asked.