ld times? No! She valued it so little that she
had evidently forgotten it. Perhaps her maid might have included it
among the small articles of luggage when they left home, or dear little
Kitty might have put it into one of her mother's trunks. In any case,
there it was now, abandoned in the drawer of a table at a hotel.

"Oh," he thought bitterly, "if I could only feel as coldly toward
Catherine as she feels toward me!" His resolution had resisted much; but
this final trial of his self-control was more than he could sustain.
He dropped into a chair--his pride of manhood recoiled from the
contemptible weakness of crying--he tried to remember that she had
divorced him, and taken his child from him. In vain! in vain! He burst
into tears.

Chapter XXXVII. Mrs. Norman.

With a heart lightened by reconciliation (not the first reconciliation
unhappily), with hopes revived, and sweet content restored, Sydney's
serenity of mind was not quite unruffled. Her thoughts were not dwelling
on the evil life which she had honestly deplored, or on the wronged wife
to whom she had been eager to make atonement. Where is the woman whose
sorrows are not thrown into the shade by the bright renewal of love? The
one anxiety that troubled Sydney was caused by remembrance of the letter
which she had sent to the convent at Sandyseal.

As her better mind now viewed it, she had doubly injured Herbert--first
in distrusting him; then by appealing from him to the compassion of
strangers.

If the reply for which she had rashly asked was waiting for her at that
moment--if the mercy of the Mother Superior was ready to comfort and
guide her--what return could she make? how could she excuse herself from
accepting what was offered in kindly reply to her own petition? She
had placed herself, for all she knew to the contrary, between two
alternatives of ingratitude equally unendurable, equally degrading.
To feel this was to feel the suspense which, to persons of excitable
temperament, is of all trials the hardest to bear. The chambermaid
was still in her room--Sydney asked if the post-office was near to the
hotel.

The woman smiled. "Everything is near us, ma'am, in this little place.
Can we send to the post-office for you?"

Sydney wrote her initials. "Ask, if you please, for a letter
addressed in that way." She handed the memorandum to the chambermaid.
"Corresponding with her lover under her husband's nose!" That was how
the chambermaid expla