t, Sir Charles, I daren't. I know you are a gentleman; pray
don't lose me my place. You would never get to see her. We none of us
know the rights, but there's something up. Sorry to say it, Sir
Charles, but we have strict orders not to admit you. Haven't you the
admiral's letter, sir?"

"No; what letter?"

"He has been after you, sir; and when he came back he sent Roger off to
your house with a letter."

A cold chill began to run down Sir Charles Bassett. He hailed a passing
hansom, and drove to his own house to get the admiral's letter; and as
he went he asked himself, with chill misgivings, what on earth had
happened.

What had happened shall be told the reader precisely but briefly..

In the first place, Bella had opened the anonymous letter and read its
contents, to which the reader is referred.

There are people who pretend to despise anonymous letters. Pure
delusion! they know they ought to, and so fancy they do; but they
don't. The absence of a signature gives weight, if the letter is ably
written and seems true.

As for poor Bella Bruce, a dove's bosom is no more fit to rebuff a
poisoned arrow than she was to combat that foulest and direst of all a
miscreant's weapons, an anonymous letter. She, in her goodness and
innocence, never dreamed that any person she did not know could
possibly tell a lie to wound her. The letter fell on her like a cruel
revelation from heaven.

The blow was so savage that, at first, it stunned her.

She sat pale and stupefied; but beneath the stupor were the rising
throbs of coming agonies.

After that horrible stupor her anguish grew and grew, till it found
vent in a miserable cry, rising, and rising, and rising, in agony.

"Mamma! mamma! mamma!"

Yes; her mother had been dead these three years, and her father sat in
the next room; yet, in her anguish, she cried to her mother--a cry the
which, if your mother had heard, she would have expected Bella's to
come to her even from the grave.

Admiral Bruce heard this fearful cry--the living calling on the
dead--and burst through the folding-doors in a moment, white as a
ghost.

He found his daughter writhing on the sofa, ghastly, and grinding in
her hand the cursed paper that had poisoned her young life.

"My child! my child!"

"Oh, papa! see! see!" And she tried to open the letter for him, but her
hands trembled so she could not.

He kneeled down by her side, the stout old warrior, and read the
letter, while she clun