. Ah! _Maude_ has gone by _my_ advice and done as _I_
said and the consequence is _she's_ a peeress for life and got a
handsome young husband _without_ a _will_ of his own."

The countess-dowager was not very adroit at spelling and composition,
whether French or English, as you observe. She made an end of her
correspondence, and sat down to a delicious little supper alone; as she
best liked to enjoy these treats. The champagne was excellent, and she
poured out a full tumbler of it at once, by way of wishing good luck to
Maude's triumphant wedding.

"And it _is_ a triumph!" she said, as she put down the empty glass. "I
hope it will bring Jane and the rest to a sense of _their_ folly."

A triumph? If you could only have looked into the future, Lady Kirton!
A triumph!

The above was not the only letter written that evening. At the hotel
where Lord and Lady Hartledon halted for the night, when she had retired
under convoy of her maid, then Val's restrained remorse broke out. He
paced the room in a sort of mad restlessness; in the midst of which he
suddenly sat down to a table on which lay pens, ink, and paper, and
poured forth hasty sentences in his mind's wretched tumult.

"My Dear Mrs. Ashton,

"I cannot address you in any more formal words, although you will have
reason to fling down the letter at my presuming to use these now--for
dear, most dear, you will ever be to me.

"What can I say? Why do I write to you? Indeed to the latter question I
can only answer I do not know, save that some instinct of good feeling,
not utterly dead within me, is urging me to it.

"Will you let me for a moment throw conventionality aside; will you for
that brief space of time let me speak truly and freely to you, as one
might speak who has passed the confines of this world?

"When a man behaves to a woman as I, to my eternal shame, have this day
behaved to Anne, it is, I think, a common custom to regard the false
man as having achieved a sort of triumph; to attribute somewhat of
humiliation to the other.

"Dear Mrs. Ashton, I cannot sleep until I have said to you that in my
case the very contrary is the fact. A more abject, humiliated man than
I stand at this hour in my own eyes never yet took his sins upon his
soul. Even you might be appeased if you could look into mine and see
its sense of degradation.

"That my punishment has already come home to me is only just; that I
shall ha