Sara sat on a low, embroidered stool by the fender, and, as she studied each line of his lordship's despatch (for so he regarded it), she would dip her fingers from time to time into a blue satin sweet-box, select, after due consideration, a chocolate or a sugared-almond, and nibble it somewhat fastidiously, with an air of making concessions to her human side. The exercise of divining the many hidden meanings in Reckage's epistle was certainly purely intellectual. Nevertheless, as she read the last sentences, she smiled with malicious triumph, for did they not convey a declaration of strong friendship in a letter designed, beyond doubt, as an argument in disfavour of all merely sentimental ties between men and women, and as a frank confession of his own inability to sustain any relation of the kind? How often had he maintained an opposite opinion--seeming contemptuous, indolent, invulnerable, unconscious of her beauty, amused rather than attracted by her brilliant spirit. Every instinct of the coquette, jealous of her own power and wretched from the sterile suffering of wounded pride, resented bitterly the unpardonable ease which he had appeared to enjoy in her society. Now, however, that he appealed to her womanliness by a humble surrender, her better, more generous nature asserted itself. Some of the old affection she had long felt for him revived. Where there had once been love, a kind of desperate fidelity still lingered, and, although Robert Orange was the ideal passion of her heart, Reckage possessed a certain influence over her which was not the less powerful because it had its root and constant nourishment in their common memory of a childhood and first youth spent together in the same county, with the same friends and the same bores. She slipped his letter, with a sigh, into her belt, and turned her attention for the third time to Pensée's tear-stained pages.