"DEAREST, DEAREST BEYOND ALL EXPRESSION, "I am returning home the day after to-morrow! Sweetest lady that heart ever adored, I am coming back to see you, to breathe the same air with you, to tread the same pavements, to kiss your hands, your lips, your feet. "Will you welcome me? I left England loving you.... I thought, to the uttermost of my capacity. Perhaps it was so then; but now I love you ... oh, infinitely more ... because I think of you always.... your exquisite letters have taught me to know you far more perfectly; and all knowledge, all thinking, leads only to fresh love. "In a way, I shrink from meeting you again. I am fearful now. In you is all the good and true, the pure and beauteous. How can I or any man be worthy of you? Suppose, after a while, I read disappointment in your face? "But be kind to me, gentle and compassionate. I kneel at your feet, and beg you to give yourself to me and to take me for your own, heart and mind and body, for ever and ever. No other woman could ever be my wife, Evarne, for no other woman could I love. "May God bless you! "GEOFF." Evarne let this letter drop on the table, then bowed her head upon it in silence. "What--what am I to do?" she murmured after a long pause, filled with a turmoil of mingled bliss and suffering. Had she been perfectly free to follow the promptings of her own heart, not one moment for reflection would have been needed. As it was, a secret indestructible, albeit so well-guarded--seemed to rise up as a hideous, pitiless spectre, bidding her set aside any idea of a future spent with Geoffrey. "I see now--didn't I know it before?--I ought never, never, to have let him grow to care so much for me," she thought, weighed down by genuine though somewhat tardy remorse. She saw that utter selfishness had ruled her so far, with the result that now it was not only--not chiefly--her own happiness that was at stake, but that of one for whom no sacrifice could be too great to be sweet.