ewed assurance of the good
opinion he had earned.

'I hardly cared,' said Nancy, as she rose with a sigh of weariness.

'But you have got over that. You will be quite cheerful now?'

'In time, no doubt.'

'I shall call again--let us say on Wednesday evening. By that time I
shall be able to put you entirely at ease with regard to Miss Morgan.'

Nancy made no reply. In shaking hands, she regarded the radiant Samuel
with a dreamy interest; and when he had left her, she still gazed for a
few moments at the door.

CHAPTER 4

The habit of confidence prompted Nancy to seek Mary Woodruff, and show
her the long-expected letter. But for Barmby's visit she would have done
so. As it was, her mind sullenly resisted the natural impulse. Forlorn
misery, intensified by successive humiliations, whereof the latest
was the bitterest, hardened her even against the one, the indubitable
friend, to whom she had never looked in vain for help and solace. Of
course it was not necessary to let Mary know with what heart-breaking
coldness Tarrant had communicated the fact of his return; but she
preferred to keep silence altogether. Having sunk so low as to accept,
with semblance of gratitude, pompous favours, dishonouring connivance,
at the hands of Samuel Barmby, she would now stand alone in her
uttermost degradation. Happen what might, she would act and suffer in
solitude.

Something she had in mind to do which Mary, if told of it, would regard
with disapproval. Mary was not a deserted and insulted wife; she could
reason and counsel with the calmness of one who sympathised, but had
nothing worse to endure. Even Mary's sympathy was necessarily imperfect,
since she knew not, and should never know, what had passed in the
crucial interviews with Beatrice French, with Jessica Morgan, and
with Samuel Barmby. Bent on indulging her passionate sense of injury,
hungering for a taste of revenge, however poor, Nancy executed with
brief delay a project which had come into her head during the hour of
torture just elapsed.

She took a sheet of notepaper, and upon it wrote half-a-dozen lines,
thus:

'As your reward for marrying me is still a long way off, and as you tell
me that you are in want, I send you as much as I can spare at present.
Next month you shall hear from me again.'

Within the paper she folded a five-pound note, and placed both in an
envelope, which she addressed to Lionel Tarrant, Esq., at his lodgings
in Westminster. Hav