out of its time, a letter from Raye. To this Edith had replied on her
own responsibility, from the depths of her own heart, without waiting for
her maid's collaboration. The luxury of writing to him what would be
known to no consciousness but his was great, and she had indulged herself
therein.

Why was it a luxury?

Edith Harnham led a lonely life. Influenced by the belief of the British
parent that a bad marriage with its aversions is better than free
womanhood with its interests, dignity, and leisure, she had consented to
marry the elderly wine-merchant as a _pis aller_, at the age of seven-and-
twenty--some three years before this date--to find afterwards that she
had made a mistake. That contract had left her still a woman whose
deeper nature had never been stirred.

She was now clearly realizing that she had become possessed to the bottom
of her soul with the image of a man to whom she was hardly so much as a
name. From the first he had attracted her by his looks and voice; by his
tender touch; and, with these as generators, the writing of letter after
letter and the reading of their soft answers had insensibly developed on
her side an emotion which fanned his; till there had resulted a magnetic
reciprocity between the correspondents, notwithstanding that one of them
wrote in a character not her own. That he had been able to seduce
another woman in two days was his crowning though unrecognized
fascination for her as the she-animal.

They were her own impassioned and pent-up ideas--lowered to monosyllabic
phraseology in order to keep up the disguise--that Edith put into letters
signed with another name, much to the shallow Anna's delight, who,
unassisted, could not for the world have conceived such pretty fancies
for winning him, even had she been able to write them. Edith found that
it was these, her own foisted-in sentiments, to which the young barrister
mainly responded. The few sentences occasionally added from Anna's own
lips made apparently no impression upon him.

The letter-writing in her absence Anna never discovered; but on her
return the next morning she declared she wished to see her lover about
something at once, and begged Mrs. Harnham to ask him to come.

There was a strange anxiety in her manner which did not escape Mrs.
Harnham, and ultimately resolved itself into a flood of tears. Sinking
down at Edith's knees, she made confession that the result of her
relations with her lover it w