was, besides, another and most cogent reason for my being a widow
just now. The Heathcotes are here, on their way to Rome, and, like
all English people, eager to go everywhere, do everything, and
know everybody; the consequence is eternal junketing and daily
dinner-parties. I need not tell you that in such a caravanserai as this
is, some one would surely turn up who should recognize me; so there was
nothing for it but to kill Captain M. and go into crape and seclusion.
As my bereavement is only a sham, I perform the affliction without
difficulty. Our mourning, too, becomes us, and, everything considered,
the incident has spared us much sight-seeing and many odious
acquaintances.

"As it is highly important that I should see and consult you, you
must come out here at once. As the friend and executor of poor 'dear
Penthony,' you can see me freely, and I really want your advice. Do I
understand you aright about Ludlow? If so, the creature is a greater
fool than I thought him. Marrying him is purely out of the question.
Of all compacts, the connubial demands implicit credulity; and if this
poor man's tea were to disagree with him, he 'd be screaming out for
antidotes before the servants, and I conclude that he cannot expect _me_
to believe in _him_. The offer you have made him on my part is a great
and brilliant one, and, for the life of me, I cannot see why he should
hesitate about it, though I, perhaps, suspect it to be this. Like most
fast men,--a very shallow class, after all,--his notion is that life,
like a whist-party, requires an accomplice. Now, I would beg him to
believe this is not the case, and that for two people who can play
their cards so well as we can, it is far better to sit down at separate
tables, where no suspicion of complicity can attach to us. I, at
least, understand what suits my own interest, which is distinctly
and emphatically to have nothing to do with him. You say that he
threatens,--threatens to engulf us both. If he were a woman, the menace
would frighten me, but men are marvellously conservative in their
selfishness, and so I read it as mere threat.

"It is, I will say, no small infliction to carry all this burden of the
past through a present rugged enough with its own difficulties. To
feel that one can be compromised, and, if compromised, ruined at any
moment,--to walk with a half-drawn indictment over one,--to mingle in
a world where each fresh arrival may turn out accuser,--is very, ver