To ordinary persons it might have seemed a not unnatural thing for Mr Tregennas to have written to Anthony, who had once or twice been his guest; but to Marmaduke the sight of the handwriting broke down the barriers which had hitherto stemmed in his slowly accumulating suspicions, and let loose a very torrent. The thoughts could not have leapt to life in that moment, but they leapt from their hiding-places. In those few feebly written words he saw revealed a very network of treachery, and walked on mechanically, looking at the letter as he walked with a kind of dumb rage. What did it conceal from him? What plot was weaving round him its web of ruin? How had Anthony toiled and dug, and how much had he gained? Gained away from him,--his own as he had thought it, and called it, and counted upon it! How had he been so blind? Jealousies that hitherto had been vague and unacknowledged took shape and rose up in fierce array. He said to himself that Anthony had seemed abstracted of late, and called himself a fool as he recollected that just before he went to London a week ago he had noticed a letter in his hand, the address upon which stirred him with a half-memory. As he walked quickly on, shut in by green lanes, he lashed himself by a hundred evidences into the conviction that Anthony was a traitor, and that in his hand he carried the letter which held the key to this treachery. In his hand. It was a strange power. To his excited imagination the thought dawned like the beginning of retribution. How many chances were there not against its thus coming into his possession! Had justice so guided it that he, of all others, should be the one to whose care it was delivered? Had Anthony's absence and Miss Philippa's fancies all worked for this end? He looked at the letter as if there, hidden only by a slender cover, lay the means of confounding his enemies, at first with a kind of angry triumph that so much at least had been gained. The letter was in his hands, and that was the first step.