amoured couple might not be disturbed. He had
already heard more than he quite excused himself for hearing in such
a manner, and having decided not to arrest the man and make him
relate exactly what Mr. Pole had spoken that evening at the Brookfield
dinner-table, he hurried on his return to town.

It was not till he had sight of his poor home; the solitary company of
chairs; the sofa looking bony and comfortless as an old female house
drudge; the table with his desk on it; and, through folding-doors, his
cold and narrow bed; not till then did the fact of his great loss stand
before him, and accuse him of living. He seated himself methodically and
wrote to Cornelia. His fancy pictured her now as sharp to every turn
of language and fall of periods: and to satisfy his imagined, rigorous
critic, he wrote much in the style of a newspaper leading article. No
one would have thought that tragic meaning underlay those choice and
sounding phrases. On reperusing the composition, he rejected it, but
only to produce one of a similar cast. He could not get to nature in his
tone. He spoke aloud a little sentence now and then, that had the ring
of a despairing tenderness. Nothing of the sort inhabited his written
words, wherein a strained philosophy and ironic resignation went on
stilts. "I should desire to see you once before I take a step that
some have not considered more than commonly serious," came toward the
conclusion; and the idea was toyed with till he signed his name. "A
plunge into the deep is of little moment to one who has been stripped
of all clothing. Is he not a wretch who stands and shivers still?" This
letter, ending with a short and not imperious, or even urgent, request
for an interview, on the morrow by the 'fruitless tree,' he sealed for
delivery into Cornelia's hands some hours before the time appointed.
He then wrote a clear business letter to his lawyer, and one of studied
ambiguity to a cousin on his mother's side. His father's brother,
Percival Barrett, to whom the estates had gone, had offered him an
annuity of five hundred pounds: "though he had, as his nephew was
aware, a large family." Sir Purcell had replied: "Let me be the first to
consider your family," rejecting the benevolence. He now addressed
his cousin, saying: "What would you think of one who accepts such a
gift?--of me, were you to hear that I had bowed my head and extended my
hand? Think this, if ever you hear of it: that I have acceded for the