his hand.

"Listen to me one moment. My last question yesterday was unwarrantable.
I never ought to have asked it; and I beg you to consider it and your
answer unspoken. Of course, I should be filled with despair if I
believed--but I don't believe--I don't conclude anything from the little
you have said. I shall still come to you at the end of the month and ask
for my answer then."

"It will be of no use," she said, sadly, with averted face and downcast
eyes.

"Don't say so. Don't deprive me of every hope. Let me beg of you to say
nothing more just now. In a month's time I will come to you, wherever
you are, and ask for your _final_ decision."

He saw that Lettice was about to speak, and so he went on hastily, "I
don't know if I am doing right, or wrong in handing you this letter from
your brother. He gave it me before I left England, and bade me deliver
it or hold it back as I saw fit."

"He knew?" said Lettice, trembling a little as the thought of her
brother's general attitude towards her wishes for independence and her
friendship for Alan Walcott. "You had told him?"

"Yes, he knew when he wrote it that I meant to ask you to be my wife. I
do not know what is in it; but I should imagine from the circumstances
that it might convey his good wishes for our joint happiness, if such a
thing could ever be! I did not make up my mind to give it to you until I
had spoken for myself."

Lettice took the letter and looked at it helplessly, the color flushing
high in her cheeks. Dalton saw her embarrassment, and divined that she
would not like to open the letter when he was there.

"I am going now," he said. "Edith and I leave Florence this afternoon.
We are going to Rome--I shall not go back to England until I have your
answer. For the present, good-bye."

Lettice gave him her hand again. He pressed it warmly, and left her
without another word. She was fain to acknowledge that he could not have
behaved with more delicacy or more generosity. But what should she say
to him when the month was at an end?

She sat for some time with Sydney's letter in her lap, wishing it were
possible for her to give Brooke Dalton the answer that he desired. But
she knew that she could not do it. It was reserved for some other woman
to make Brooke Dalton happy. She, probably, could not have done it if
she had tried; and she consoled herself by thinking that he would live
to see this himself.

Sydney's handwriting on the sealed envelope