down.
Can't you sail us beyond its reach, Mr. Flamel?"

Flamel shook his head. "Not even with this breeze. Literature travels
faster than steam nowadays. And the worst of it is that we can't any
of us give up reading; it's as insidious as a vice and as tiresome as a
virtue."

"I believe it IS a vice, almost, to read such a book as the 'Letters,'"
said Mrs. Touchett. "It's the woman's soul, absolutely torn up by the
roots--her whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently didn't care;
who couldn't have cared. I don't mean to read another line; it's too
much like listening at a keyhole."

"But if she wanted it published?"

"Wanted it? How do we know she did?"

"Why, I heard she'd left the letters to the man--whoever he is--with
directions that they should be published after his death--"

"I don't believe it," Mrs. Touchett declared.

"He's dead then, is he?" one of the men asked.

"Why, you don't suppose if he were alive he could ever hold up his
head again, with these letters being read by everybody?" Mrs. Touchett
protested. "It must have been horrible enough to know they'd been
written to him; but to publish them! No man could have done it and no
woman could have told him to--"

"Oh, come, come," Dresham judicially interposed; "after all, they're not
love-letters."

"No--that's the worst of it; they're unloved letters," Mrs. Touchett
retorted.

"Then, obviously, she needn't have written them; whereas the man, poor
devil, could hardly help receiving them."

"Perhaps he counted on the public to save him the trouble of reading
them," said young Hartly, who was in the cynical stage.

Mrs. Armiger turned her reproachful loveliness to Dresham. "From the way
you defend him, I believe you know who he is."

Everyone looked at Dresham, and his wife smiled with the superior air of
the woman who is in her husband's professional secrets. Dresham shrugged
his shoulders.

"What have I said to defend him?"

"You called him a poor devil--you pitied him."

"A man who could let Margaret Aubyn write to him in that way? Of course
I pity him."

"Then you MUST know who he is," cried Mrs. Armiger, with a triumphant
air of penetration.

Hartly and Flamel laughed and Dresham shook his head. "No one knows; not
even the publishers; so they tell me at least."

"So they tell you to tell us," Hartly astutely amended; and Mrs. Armiger
added, with the appearance of carrying the argument a point farther,
"But even if HE'S