Wathin, containing
the, single line:

'Your prophesy is confirmed.'

Dacier was comfortably able to face his Club after the excitement of a
proposal, with a bride on his hands. He was assaulted concerning the
article, and he parried capitally. Say that her lips were rather cold: at
any rate, they invigorated him. Her character was guaranteed--not the
hazy idea of a dupe. And her fortune would be enormous: a speculation
merely due to worldly prudence and prospective ambition.

At the dinner-table of four, in the evening, conversation would have
seemed dull to him, by contrast, had it not, been for the presiding grace
of his bride, whose habitually eminent feminine air of superiority to the
repast was throned by her appreciative receptiveness of his looks and
utterances. Before leaving her, he won her consent to a very early
marriage; on the plea of a possibly approaching Session, and also that
they had waited long. The consent, notwithstanding the hurry of
preparations, it involved, besides the annihilation of her desire to
meditate on so solemn a change in her life and savour the congratulations
of her friends and have the choir of St. Catherine's rigorously drilled
in her favourite anthems was beautifully yielded to the pressure of
circumstances.

There lay on his table at night a letter; a bulky letter. No need to tear
it open for sight of the signature: the superscription was redolent of
that betraying woman. He tossed it unopened into the fire.

As it was thick, it burned sullenly, discolouring his name on the
address, as she had done, and still offering him a last chance of viewing
the contents. She fought on the consuming fire to have her exculpation
heard.

But was she not a shameless traitor? She had caught him by his love of
his country and hope to serve it. She had wound into his heart to bleed
him of all he knew and sell the secrets for money. A wonderful sort of
eloquence lay there, on those coals, no doubt. He felt a slight movement
of curiosity to glance at two or three random sentences: very slight. And
why read them now? They were valueless to him, mere outcries. He judged
her by the brute facts. She and her slowly-consuming letter were of a
common blackness. Moreover, to read them when he was plighted to another
woman would be senseless. In the discovery of her baseness, she had made
a poor figure. Doubtless during the afternoon she had trimmed her
intuitive Belial art of making 'the worse appea