self. At last
her sense of duty prevailed! She would not deliver the letter. No, not
if her life depended on it. The question was---- Ah, this would be what
she would do. A brilliant idea had struck her. Louise went to the
dressing-table. It was covered with Lady Dashwood's toilet things, all
neatly arranged. On the top of the jewel drawers at one side lay two
envelopes, letters that had come by the last post and had been put aside
hurriedly by Lady Dashwood. Louise lifted these two letters and
underneath them placed the letter addressed to Miss Gwendolen Scott.

"Good!" exclaimed Louise to the empty room. "The letter is now in the
disposition of the Good God! And the Warden! All that there is of the
most as it ought to be! Ah, but it is incredible!"

Louise went to the door and put out the lights. Then she closed the door
softly behind her and went downstairs.

CHAPTER IV

THE UNFORESEEN HAPPENS

Before his maternal aunt had left him Chartcote, the Honourable Bernard
Boreham's income had been just sufficient to enable him to live without
making himself useful. The Boreham estate in Ireland was burdened with
obligations to female relatives who lived in various depressing
watering-places in England. Bernard, the second son, had not been sent
to a public school or University. He had struggled up as best he might,
and like all the members of his family, he had left his beloved country
as soon as he possibly could, and had picked up some extra shillings in
London by writing light articles of an inflammatory nature for papers
that required them. Boreham had had no real practical acquaintance with
the world. He had never been responsible for any one but himself. He was
a floating cloudlet. Ideas came to him easily--all the more easily
because he was scantily acquainted with the mental history of the past.
He did not know what had been already thought out and dismissed, nor
what had been tried and had failed. The world was new to him--new--and
full of errors.

From the moment that Chartcote became his and he was his own master, it
occurred to him that he might write a really great book. A book that
would make the world conscious of its follies. He felt that it was time
that some one--like himself--who could shed the superstitions and the
conventions of the past and step out a new man with new ideas,
uncorrupted by kings or priests (or Oxford traditions), and give a lead
to the world.

It was, of course, an unf