ask questions about Robert. No questions,
on the other hand, are asked about Aumerle. Aumerle lives like the
rest of us: he does everything he ought not to do--he surprises
nobody: he delivers his neighbours over to the absolute power of
accomplished facts. (A way of saying that he doesn't care a rap
about the fellow who falls among thieves.) Dear Valerie! What a
pleasure it is to write to you! I can utter my inmost thoughts. I
am often suspected of callousness. This letter will show you how
truly I feel the sorrows of my few real friends. I cannot bear to
think that Orange should be beaten, as it were, by Parflete. A more
fawning, wretched creature than Parflete one never saw. I shall
not be set right in my own idea of the Divine Justice unless this
battle, at any rate, is to the strong. Write to me. I don't want to
whine, but I may tell you that I am not happy.

Your affectionate friend,

BEAUCLERK R.

Sara sat on a low, embroidered stool by the fender, and, as she studied
each line of his lordship's despatch (for so he regarded it), she would
dip her fingers from time to time into a blue satin sweet-box, select,
after due consideration, a chocolate or a sugared-almond, and nibble it
somewhat fastidiously, with an air of making concessions to her human
side. The exercise of divining the many hidden meanings in Reckage's
epistle was certainly purely intellectual. Nevertheless, as she read the
last sentences, she smiled with malicious triumph, for did they not
convey a declaration of strong friendship in a letter designed, beyond
doubt, as an argument in disfavour of all merely sentimental ties
between men and women, and as a frank confession of his own inability to
sustain any relation of the kind? How often had he maintained an
opposite opinion--seeming contemptuous, indolent, invulnerable,
unconscious of her beauty, amused rather than attracted by her brilliant
spirit. Every instinct of the coquette, jealous of her own power and
wretched from the sterile suffering of wounded pride, resented bitterly
the unpardonable ease which he had appeared to enjoy in her society.
Now, however, that he appealed to her womanliness by a humble
surrender, her better, more generous nature asserted itself. Some of the
old affection she had long felt for him revived. Where there had once
been love, a kind of desper