nk it over, Sicily--Cairo!"

She left the room, saying to herself that Eglington was a fool, and
that danger was ahead. "But I hold a red light--poor darling!" she said
aloud, as she went up the staircase. She did not know that Eglington,
standing in a deep doorway, heard her, and seized upon the words eagerly
and suspiciously, and turned them over in his mind.

Below, at the desk where Eglington's mother used to write, Hylda sat
with a bundle of letters before her. For some moments she opened,
glanced through them, and put them aside. Presently she sat back in her
chair, thinking--her mind was invaded by the last words of the Duchess;
and somehow they kept repeating themselves with the words in the late
Countess's diary: "Is it only the mother in me, not the love in me?"
Mechanically her hand moved over the portfolio of the late Countess, and
it involuntarily felt in one of its many pockets. Her hand came upon
a letter. This had remained when the others had been taken out. It was
addressed to the late Earl, and was open. She hesitated a moment, then,
with a strange premonition and a tightening of her heart-strings, she
spread it out and read it.

At first she could scarcely see because of the mist in her eyes; but
presently her sight cleared, and she read quickly, her cheeks burning
with excitement, her heart throbbing violently. The letter was the
last expression of a disappointed and barren life. The slow, stammering
tongue of an almost silent existence had found the fulness of speech.
The fountains of the deep had been broken up, and Sybil Eglington's
repressed emotions, undeveloped passions, tortured by mortal sufferings,
and refined and vitalised by the atmosphere blown in upon her last hours
from the Hereafter, were set free, given voice and power at last.

The letter reviewed the life she had lived with her husband during
twenty-odd years, reproved herself for not speaking out and telling him
his faults at the beginning, and for drawing in upon herself, when she
might have compelled him to a truer understanding; and, when all
that was said, called him to such an account as only the dying might
make--the irrevocable, disillusionising truth which may not be altered,
the poignant record of failure and its causes.

"... I could not talk well, I never could, as a girl," the
letter ran; "and you could talk like one inspired, and so
speciously, so overwhelmingly, that I felt I could say nothing in
disa