"Yours faithfully,
"John Amherst.

"Please don't let my wife ride Impulse."

Latent under Justine's acute consciousness of what this letter meant,
was the sense of Bessy's inferences and conjectures. She could feel them
actually piercing the page in her hand like some hypersensitive visual
organ to which matter offers no obstruction. Or rather, baffled in their
endeavour, they were evoking out of the unseen, heaven knew what
fantastic structure of intrigue--scrawling over the innocent page with
burning evidences of perfidy and collusion....

One thing became instantly clear to her: she must show the letter to
Bessy. She ran her eyes over it again, trying to disentangle the
consequences. There was the allusion to their talk in town--well, she
had told Bessy of that! But the careless reference to their woodland
excursions--what might not Bessy, in her present mood, make of it?
Justine's uppermost thought was of distress at the failure of her plan.
Perhaps she might still have induced Amherst to come back, had it not
been for this accident; but now that hope was destroyed.

She raised her eyes and met Bessy's. "Will you read it?" she said,
holding out the letter.

Bessy received it with lifted brows, and a protesting murmur--but as she
read, Justine saw the blood mount under her clear skin, invade the
temples, the nape, even the little flower-like ears; then it receded as
suddenly, ebbing at last from the very lips, so that the smile with
which she looked up from her reading was as white as if she had been
under the stress of physical pain.

"So you have written my husband to come back?"

"As you see."

Bessy looked her straight in the eyes. "I am very much obliged to
you--extremely obliged!"

Justine met the look quietly. "Which means that you resent my
interference----"

"Oh, I leave you to call it that!" Bessy mocked, tossing the letter down
on the table at her side.

"Bessy! Don't take it in that way. If I made a mistake I did so with the
hope of helping you. How can I stand by, after all these months
together, and see you deliberately destroying your life without trying
to stop you?"

The smile withered on Bessy's lips. "It is very dear and good of you--I
know you're never happy unless you're helping people--but in this case I
can only repeat what my husband says. He and I don't often look at
things in the same light--but I quite agree with him that the management
of such matters i