"I have something to tell you which you must know at once. I can approach the subject in no roundabout fashion, because I know it will cause you a great shock, and it is better for you to know it at once. I do not pretend to any doubt about the pain and grief which I am sure it will cause you. I will tell you my reasons for the step I am about to take when I tell you what I have already done. Walter, I have broken my engagement with you. I have promised to marry Mr. Creswell. "I write this to you at once, almost directly after he proposed to me, and I have accepted him. Does it seem harsh and coarse in me to announce this to you so immediately? Believe me, the announcement is made from far different motives. I could not bear to be deceiving you. You will sneer at this, and say I have been deceiving you all along. I swear I have not. You will think that the very silence for which you reproached me in the letter just received has been owing to my dislike to tell you of the change in affairs. I swear it has not. I had no idea until this morning that Mr. Creswell liked me in any especial way; certainly none that he would ever ask me to become his wife. "When he asked me, I had not had your letter. If I had, it would have made no difference in the answer I made to Mr. Creswell, but it deepens the pain with which I now write to you, showing me as it does, to an extent which I did not before quite realise, the store which you set by what is now lost to us for ever. I do not say this in excuse of myself or my deeds; I have no excuse to make. I have tried, and tried hard, to live in the position of life in which I have been placed. I have struggled with poverty, and tried to face the future--which would have been worse than poverty, penury, misery, want perhaps--with calmness. I have failed. I cannot help it, it is my nature to love money and all that money brings, to love comforts and luxuries, to shrink from privation. Had I gone straight from my father's deathbed to your house as your wife, I might perhaps have battled on; but we came here, and--I cannot go back. You will be far happier without me when your first shock is over. I should have been an impossible wife for a poor man, I know I should--complaining, peevish, irritable; ever repining at my poverty, ever envying the wealth of others. You are better without me, Walter, you are indeed! Our ways of life will be very different, and we shall never come across each other in any probability. If we should, I hope we shall meet as friends. I am sure it will not be very long before you recognise the wisdom of the course I am now taking, and are grateful to me for having taken it. You are full of talent, which you will now doubtless turn to good account, and of worthy aspirations, which you will find some one to sympathise with, and share the upward career which I am sure is before you. I thought I could have done as much at one time, but I know now that I