shape. Return it before the end of the week, and I
will have it engrossed for signature. I go to Scotland next
Wednesday for a month; shall be back in good time for your wedding.
My love to your mother when you see her.
Your-affectionate uncle,
EDMUND PARAMOR.

Shelton smiled and took out the draft.

"This Indenture made the___day of 190_, between Richard Paramor
Shelton--"

He put it down and sank back in his chair, the chair in which the foreign
vagrant had been wont to sit on mornings when he came to preach
philosophy.

He did not stay there long, but in sheer unhappiness got up, and, taking
his candle, roamed about the room, fingering things, and gazing in the
mirror at his face, which seemed to him repulsive in its wretchedness.
He went at last into the hall and opened the door, to go downstairs again
into the street; but the sudden certainty that, in street or house, in
town or country, he would have to take his trouble with him, made him
shut it to. He felt in the letterbox, drew forth a letter, and with this
he went back to the sitting-room.

It was from Antonia. And such was his excitement that he was forced to
take three turns between the window and the wall before he could read;
then, with a heart beating so that he could hardly hold the paper, he
began:

I was wrong to ask you to go away. I see now that it was breaking my
promise, and I did n't mean to do that. I don't know why things have
come to be so different. You never think as I do about anything.

I had better tell you that that letter of Monsieur Ferrand's to mother
was impudent. Of course you did n't know what was in it; but when
Professor Brayne was asking you about him at breakfast, I felt that you
believed that he was right and we were wrong, and I can't understand it.
And then in the afternoon, when that woman hurt her horse, it was all as
if you were on her side. How can you feel like that?

I must say this, because I don't think I ought to have asked you to go
away, and I want you to believe that I will keep my promise, or I should
feel that you and everybody else had a right to condemn me. I was awake
all last night, and have a bad headache this morning. I can't write any
more.
ANTONIA.

His first sensation was a sort of stupefaction of relief that had in it
an element of anger. He was reprieved! She would not break her promise;
she considered herself bound! In the midst of the