ojects; but I thought there
were compensating advantages. This wrecking of your future at my hands I
did not contemplate. You are sure there is no escape? Have you his
letter with the conditions, or the will? Let me see the letter in which
he expresses his wishes.'

'I assure you it is all as I say,' he pensively returned. 'Even if I
were not legally bound by the conditions I should be morally.'

'But how does he put it? How does he justify himself in making such a
harsh restriction? Do let me see the letter, Swithin. I shall think it
a want of confidence if you do not. I may discover some way out of the
difficulty if you let me look at the papers. Eccentric wills can be
evaded in all sorts of ways.'

Still he hesitated. 'I would rather you did not see the papers,' he
said.

But she persisted as only a fond woman can. Her conviction was that she
who, as a woman many years his senior, should have shown her love for him
by guiding him straight into the paths he aimed at, had blocked his
attempted career for her own happiness. This made her more intent than
ever to find out a device by which, while she still retained him, he
might also retain the life-interest under his uncle's will.

Her entreaties were at length too potent for his resistance. Accompanying
her downstairs to the cabin, he opened the desk from which the other
papers had been taken, and against his better judgment handed her the
ominous communication of Jocelyn St. Cleeve which lay in the envelope
just as it had been received three-quarters of a year earlier.

'Don't read it now,' he said. 'Don't spoil our meeting by entering into
a subject which is virtually past and done with. Take it with you, and
look it over at your leisure--merely as an old curiosity, remember, and
not as a still operative document. I have almost forgotten what the
contents are, beyond the general advice and stipulation that I was to
remain a bachelor.'

'At any rate,' she rejoined, 'do not reply to the note I have seen from
the solicitors till I have read this also.'

He promised. 'But now about our public wedding,' he said. 'Like certain
royal personages, we shall have had the religious rite and the civil
contract performed on independent occasions. Will you fix the day? When
is it to be? and shall it take place at a registrar's office, since there
is no necessity for having the sacred part over again?'

'I'll think,' replied she. 'I'll think it over.'