tatingly she laid a hand upon his arm, but there was no
loving-kindness in his look. The arms which yesterday--only
yesterday--had clasped her passionately and hungrily to his breast now
hung inert at his side. His eyes were strange and hard.

"Will you come in here," he said, in an arid voice, and held wide the
door of the room where he and Rudyard had settled the first chapter of
the future and closed the book of the past.

She entered with hesitating step. Then he shut the door with an
accentuated softness, and came to the table where he had sat with
Rudyard. Mechanically she took the seat which Rudyard had occupied, and
looked at him across the table with a dread conviction stealing over
her face, robbing it of every vestige of its heavenly colour, giving
her eyes a staring and solicitous look.

"Well, what is it? Can't you speak and have it over?" she asked, with
desperate impatience.

"Fellowes' letter to you--Rudyard found it," he said, abruptly.

She fell back as though she had been struck, then recovered herself.
"You read it?" she gasped.

"Rudyard made me read it. I came in when he was just about to kill
Fellowes."

She gave a short, sharp cry, which with a spasm of determination her
fingers stopped.

"Kill him--why?" she asked in a weak voice, looking down at her
trembling hands which lay clasped on the table before her.

"The letter--Fellowes' letter to you."

"I dropped it last night," she said, in a voice grown strangely
impersonal and colourless. "I dropped it in Rudyard's room, I suppose."

She seemed not to have any idea of excluding the terrible facts, but to
be speaking as it were to herself and of something not vital, though
her whole person was transformed into an agony which congealed the
lifeblood.

Her voice sounded tuneless and ragged. "He read it--Rudyard read a
letter which was not addressed to him! He read a letter addressed to
me--he read my letter.... It gave me no chance."

"No chance--?"

A bitter indignation was added to the cheerless discord of her tones.
"Yes, I had a chance, a last chance--if he had not read the letter. But
now, there is no chance.... You read it, too. You read the letter which
was addressed to me. No matter what it was--my letter, you read it."

"Rudyard said to me in his terrible agitation, 'Read that letter, and
then tell me what you think of the man who wrote it.' ... I thought it
was the letter I wrote to you, the letter I posted to you last n