to sort and settle everything.
They had been piled up in the smoking-room.

I sadly glanced through them as they lay. Oh, I am not a hypocrite to
say that when I first went back into this room, full of tipsy horrors
as its associations were, it brought Augustus back so vividly that I
sat down and cried.

I had never wished him ill, and would have given him back his life if
I could. To die so young, with everything to make existence fair! It
seemed too sad.

I lifted the pile of papers, one after another, and at last came upon
one with the address printed on the outside of the envelope--the
address of the dress-maker where Lady Grenellen's clothes came from.

This bill the lawyers should not see. I looked carefully to the end of
the pile. There were no more of any consequence. I wished I could find
her letters too, to save them also. The drawers were all locked. I
could not think that night what to do, but when the lawyers came next
day I asked them to give me any letters they might find with the same
writing on the envelope as the one I showed them--her note of sympathy
to me--and not to examine them.

And so it was that a day or two afterwards I had before me six letters
with a gold coronet emblazoned upon the envelopes.

I had paid the bill. I wrote the check and despatched it the night
I found it, and now the receipt also lay beside the letters. I tied
them together and sealed the bundle with Augustus's seal. I put the
receipted bill with them, and enclosed the whole packet in another
envelope, and addressed it to Lady Grenellen.

I had not answered her letter of sympathy. This would be my answer.

A thick skin is a fortunate gift, it appears, and one I had thought
of extreme rareness in the class to which she belongs. What was my
surprise to receive a gushing letter of thanks by return of post! My
husband and she had been such friends, she said, and he had helped
her before so kindly out of her difficulties, and it was too good of
me to have paid this bill--she could see by the date I must have paid
it--and it all was too sad, and she hoped we should meet later on,
perhaps at Harley! Her own husband was coming home, slightly wounded,
she added.

Had I been in a laughing mood I should have laughed aloud at the
effrontery of the whole thing. Well, perhaps it was better so. As far
as I am concerned the whole incident shall be forgotten--a memory of
Augustus sunk into the past.

And so January passed and Fe