"I have a great deal to tell you about ourselves and friends, which I am sure you will be pleased to hear. In the first place, both my wife and myself are completely happy--all the clouds of our earlier life have vanished, and I think that no married pair can have such perfect confidence and love for one another. I ascribe this happy state of things to you, dear old fellow, for had you not made Mrs. Veilsturm leave San Remo, and brought my wife to my sick bed, we could never have come together again. I know, good friend that you are, you will be pleased to hear we are so perfectly happy, and that every year--every day--every hour, my wife grows dearer to me. As I write these words her dear face is bending over my shoulder to read what I have set down, and she cordially endorses what I have said. "Thanks to your kind gift of Aunt Jelly's money, all things pecuniarily are well with me. I have paid off the mortgages on the Hall, and invested the rest of the money, so what with the income arising from such investments, and my rents, now regularly coming to me instead of to the lawyers, I am quite a rich man, and the Erringtons can once wore hold up their head in the county as a representative family. "By-the-way, I have some news to give you about our mutual friend, Mrs. Veilsturm, with whom I was so infatuated. She went on to New York, followed by Dolly Thambits, and has now married him. He is a young idiot to be sure, but then he has an excellent income, and that is all she cares about. Won't she spend his thousands for him? Well, I think you and I agree on that subject. Regarding Major Griff, she evidently found him less useful after than before she became Mrs. Thambits, so she has pensioned him off with a few thousands, and I hear the Major has gone to Central America, with a view to entering the service of one of the republics of those regions. His future fate is not hard to prophesy, as he will either become President or be shot, but in either event I don't think he'll trouble our fair friend again who has retired so peacefully into married life. Next year, I believe, she is coming to town, and is going to cut a great dash, so no doubt Mrs. Thambits will be even more popular than Mrs. Veilsturm--although, I dare say, there will not be any Sunday evenings of the Monte Carlo style. "You will perhaps wonder at my writing so coolly about this lady, but the fact is, I now see only too clearly the danger I escaped. She would have ruined my life, and certainly made a good attempt to do so, only you fortunately intervened in time. What magic you used to force her to leave me alone I do not know, but I certainly have to thank you for extricating me from a very perilous position.