d been
thrown aside. The half-finished garments, neatly folded, lay under a
cover she had no strength to remove.

In June she wrote a pitiful little note to her lover. She said that he
ought to tell her, if he was tired of their engagement. She told Will
what she had said, and asked him to post the letter. He answered
angrily, "Don't you write a word to him, good or bad!" And he tore the
letter into twenty pieces before her eyes.

"Oh, Will, I cannot bear it!"

"Thou art a woman: bear what other women have tholed before thee."
Then he went angrily from her presence. Brune was thrumming on the
window-pane. She thought he looked sorry for her; she touched his arm
and said, "Brune, will you take a letter to Dalton post for me?"

"For sure I will. Go thy ways and write it, and I'll be gone before
Will is back."

It was an unfortunate letter, as letters written in a hurry always
are. Absolute silence would have piqued and worried Ulfar. He would
have fancied her ill, dying perhaps; and the uncertainty, vague and
portentous, would have prompted him to action, if only to satisfy his
own mind. Sometimes he feared that a girl so sensitive would fade away
in neglect; and he expected a letter from William Anneys saying so.
But a hurried, halting, not very correct epistle, whose whole tenour
was, "What is the matter? What have I done? Do you remember last year
at this time?" irritated him beyond reply.

He was still in Italy when it reached him. Sir Thomas Fenwick was not
likely ever to return to England. He was slowly dying, and he had been
removed to a villa in the Italian hills. And Elizabeth Redware had a
friend with her, a young widow just come from Athens, who affected at
times its splendid picturesque national costume. She was a very
bright, handsome woman, whose fine education had been supplemented by
travel, society, and a rather unhappy matrimonial experience. She knew
how to pique and provoke, how to flirt to the very edge of danger and
then sheer off, how to manipulate men before the fire of passion, as
witches used to manipulate their waxen images before the blazing
coals.

She had easily won Ulfar's confidence; she had even assisted in the
selection of the cameos; and she declared to Elizabeth that she would
not for a whole world interfere between Ulfar and his pretty innocent!
A natural woman was such a phenomenon! She was glad Ulfar was going to
marry a phenomenon.

Elizabeth knew her better. She gave the