street.

I took no heed of anything, neither the atmosphere round me nor the
direction in which my feet carried me. I was wrapped up in a maze of
thoughts, and there was not a decently pleasant one in the whole lot.

They were warmed and brightened every now and then as a form that I
loved glided amongst them, but even that form dragged after it a chain
of painful, fettering considerations, and the gleams of light that it
threw round it were only like those weak, pallid flashes of sun that
flit through the clouds of thunder and storm in a hurricane.

CHAPTER II.

The next morning when I came down to breakfast it was late, and my
father had already withdrawn to his own library. I had missed again
speaking to him, as I could not seek and disturb him there.

He also was a writer, though quite of a different school from myself.
He wrote ardently upon politics, political economy, and statistics,
things which I took no interest in.

The nation might arrange itself how it pleased for all I cared. What I
wanted to arrange was my own life. I had no ambition to set my
country's affairs straight, my own thoughts were too much engaged in
tugging my own into some sort of order.

There were some letters for me, and I turned them over listlessly,
balancing them tip in succession against the toast-rack in front of me,
without opening any. The last I came to was quite different from any of
the others, and being the last, it stood foremost before me, and I
looked at it while I went on with my breakfast.

It is curious how representative a letter generally is of its writer.
The mere outside is like a psychological photograph. Of course it does
not give details, but it presents you with a wonderfully accurate
outline of the cut of a person's identity. This envelope was square,
and looked as hard, white and clean as if a stone-tablet had passed
through the post. It bore a delicate, weak, feminine superscription,
hurried and careless; the writing unformed, but graceful and
distinguished; and on the other side of the letter, stamped in grey,
stood a crest, and the motto subscrolled.

Yes, the woman who had written it was very like the letter. Immaculate
and perhaps somewhat hard, delicate, and in will a little weak,
impulsive and undecided, well-bred, and strikingly typical of the class
to which she belonged.

I broke the letter open after a minute and read--

"DEAREST VICTOR,--Do come and see me as soon as you possibly