h them upstairs.

He stopped her, and asked her why she did not put the letters on the
hall table as usual. The maid, looking very much confused, said that her
mistress had desired that whatever the postman had brought that morning
should be carried up to her room. He took the letters abruptly from the
girl, without asking any more questions, and went back into his study.

Up to this time no shadow of a suspicion had fallen on his mind.
Hitherto there had been a simple obvious explanation for every unusual
event that had occurred during the last three or four days; but this
last circumstance in connection with the letters was not to be accounted
for. Nevertheless, even now, it was not distrust of his wife that was
busy at his mind--he was too fond of her and too proud of her to feel
it--the sensation was more like uneasy surprise. He longed to go and
question her, and get a satisfactory answer, and have done with it. But
there was a voice speaking within him that had never made itself heard
before--a voice with a persistent warning in it, that said, Wait; and
look at your letters first.

He spread them out on the table with hands that trembled he knew not
why. Among them was the back number of the _Times_ for which he had
written to London, with a letter from the publisher explaining the means
by which the copy had been procured.

He opened the newspaper with a vague feeling of alarm at finding that
those letters to the editor which he had been so eager to read, and
that perfecting of the mutilated volume which he had been so anxious to
accomplish, had become objects of secondary importance in his mind. An
inexplicable curiosity about the general contents of the paper was now
the one moving influence which asserted itself within him, he spread
open the broad sheet on the table.

The first page on which his eye fell was the page on the right-hand
side. It contained those very letters--three in number--which he had
once been so anxious to see. He tried to read them, but no effort could
fix his wandering attention. He looked aside to the opposite page, on
the left hand. It was the page that contained the leading articles.

They were three in number. The first was on foreign politics; the second
was a sarcastic commentary on a recent division in the House of Lords;
the third was one of those articles on social subjects which have
greatly and honorably helped to raise the reputation of the _Times_
above all contest and