tter, and
looked questioningly over it at Grandcourt:

"What's it about?--if you know," he asked wearily. "I'm not inclined
just now to read anything that may be unpleasant."

Grandcourt said quietly:

"I have not read the letter, but your wife has told me something of what
it contains. She wrote and mailed it to you weeks ago--before the
crash--saying, I believe, that adversity was not the time for the
settlement of domestic differences, and that if her private fortune
could avert disaster, you were to write immediately to her attorneys."

Dysart gazed at him as though stunned; then his dull gaze fell once more
on the envelope. He examined it, went all over it with lack-lustre eyes,
laid it aside, and finally began to read his wife's letter--the letter
that had never reached him because he had used another name on the hotel
register in Baltimore.

Grandcourt watched him with painful interest as he sat, hunched up,
coughing at intervals, and poring over his wife's long, angular
chirography. There was much between the lines to read, but Dysart could
never read it; much to understand, but he could never understand it.

"Delancy tells me," she wrote, "that you are threatened with very
serious difficulties. Once or twice you yourself have said as much
to me; and my answer was that they no longer concerned me.

"The situation is this: I have, as you know, consulted counsel with
a view to begin proceedings for a separation. This has been
discontinued--temporarily, at any rate--because I have been led to
believe by your friend, Delancy Grandcourt, that the present is no
time to add to your perplexities.

"He has, I may add, induced me to believe other things which my
better sense rejects; but no woman's logic--which is always half
sentiment--could remain unshaken by the simple loyalty to you and to
me of this friend of yours and of mine. And this letter would never
have been written except, practically, at his dictation. Kindly
refrain from showing it to him as my acknowledgment here of his
influence in the matter would grieve him very deeply.

"Because he believes that it is still possible for you and me to
return to civilised relations; he believes that I care for you,
that, in your own leisurely and superficial fashion, you still
really honour the vows that bound you--still in your heart care for
me. Let him believe it; and if you will