in your letter to him.
But then came the announcement of your marriage, since which time
your name has not been mentioned between us."

"Did you keep that letter?" she said.

"I did."

"Will you let me see it?"

"I am afraid I cannot properly do that."

"I beg that you will, Mr. Spotswood. You would be doing me a very
great favor, and for your cousin's sake also I think I may venture to
ask it. I was told that he was 'fickle and capricious, incapable of a
sustained affection,' and much more in the same line. I should be
truly glad to know that this was false."

"I can give you my word for that."

"But you can give me also his word, if you will," she said,
beseechingly. "Oh, my dear, dear friend, I too have suffered, and I
believe that what I have endured is the worst of pain, for it comes
from the knowledge of wrong to another. You cannot take away that
pain, but perhaps you can restore to me a lost ideal. I had come to
think that there was no such thing as love--real love--in the world;
to believe not only that the man who had professed it for me was
false in that profession, but that it really did not exist. Let me
see that letter. It is an impersonal thing to me now, but I feel that
it would strengthen me for all my future life. I am going to try to
be good; indeed I am," she said, her lips trembling like a child's.
"If I feel that that letter would help me, why may I not see it?"

The rector hesitated visibly; then he said:

"You shall see it, Bettina. I cannot feel that it will do any harm,
and it will be an act of justice, perhaps, to him as well as to you.
Whoever represented him to be lacking in depth of feeling has done
him a wrong indeed. I had no need to have this proved to me, but if
there be such a need in any breast, the reading of this letter must
do away with it."

In a few moments he rose to take leave, having promised to send the
letter to her.

"Will you send it at once?" she asked. "May Nora go with you and
bring it back?"

In the stress of her feeling she forgot the impression that her
eagerness might make; but it had not been lost upon the rector, who
pondered all these things in his heart as he went homeward.

When he had given the letter to Nora, and she had taken it to her
mistress, he wondered if he had done well. Bettina had not pretended
that she had really loved the man to whom she had first engaged
herself. The preoccupied interest and affection which she had given
him t