had learned. During all this time, he had received no hint
that young Pyle had followed her from his house. He could only imagine
the facts. When Lena left that place to go to Bishop Wycliffe's, she
doubtless had an honest desire to escape from the unwelcome attentions
she had told him of. She must have begun to weaken only after
discovering that the man for whom she made the effort had played her
false.

Emmet threw down the paper with a groan and turned to his desk, moved
by a desperate hope that he could force himself to appreciate the
reality of the interests those piled envelopes represented. He seized
them feverishly, and began to shuffle them over like a pack of cards.
His random glance was arrested by a thin, wavering hand he knew well,
scrawled on an envelope that bore the picture and name of a New York
hotel. Had he been a student of chirography, he might have read the
secret of the enigma that tormented him in those pale, uncertain
pen-strokes, so unlike the firm, compact characters by which Miss
Wycliffe visualised her will. But his only thought was that this
letter came to him as a final explanation and farewell, after he had
lost her forever.

The epistle was confused, and blotted with tears. She told how Pyle
had pursued her, how she had resisted him, how she had finally yielded
to his importunities, to shield the man that had wronged her and to
save herself. If she had not done this, she would have killed herself,
but she was afraid to die, and there was no third way. She wrote no
word of reproach, but closed with a final message of love and a prayer
for his happiness.

Emmet shrank from the lines, as if each were the waving lash of a whip
that descended upon him. When he had finished reading, he tore the
letter into minute fragments and threw them in the basket. His heart
was swelling with the sense of a tragedy that was not completed, but
only begun, a tragedy that he and Lena must share together. She had
bound him to her forever by putting this barrier between them. He
thought of Felicity only to resolve to free himself from her at once,
that he might be in readiness to come to Lena's aid in the future,
should she need him. Perhaps God would yet give him a chance to make
amends. If her husband would only break his worthless neck in one of
his mad rushes with his machine, Emmet reflected savagely, or drink
himself to death--

Any moment some one might come in and find him there. H