ray wasn't wanted again, and Ann, of course, didn't
choose to wash it, so she only found it yesterday and brought it to
me.'

'Trixie,' said Mark, 'I can't follow all those "its." I gather that
I'm entitled to something sticky, but I haven't a notion what. Hadn't
you better get it, whatever it happens to be?'

'Why, it's a letter of course, goose!' said Trixie. 'I told you _that_
the very first thing: wait here, and I'll bring it to you.'

So Mark waited patiently in the homely little back parlour, where he
had prepared his work as a schoolboy in the old days, where he had
smoked his first cigar in his first Cambridge vacation. He smiled as
he thought how purely intellectual his enjoyment of that cigar had
been, and how for the first time he had appreciated the meaning of
'the bitter end;' he was smiling still when Trixie returned.

'Whom do you know in India, Mark?' she said curiously; 'perhaps it's
some admirer who's read the book. I hope it's nothing really
important; if it is, it wasn't our fault that--Mark, you're not _ill_,
are you?'

'No,' said Mark, placing himself with his back to the light, and
stuffing the letter, after one hasty glance at the direction, unopened
into his pocket. 'Of course not--why should I be?'

'Is there anything in the letter to worry you?' persisted Trixie. 'It
can't be a bill, can it?'

'Never mind what it is,' said Mark; 'have you got the keys? I--I
should like a glass of wine.'

'Ma left the keys in the cupboard,' said Trixie; 'how lucky! port or
sherry, Mark?'

'Brandy, if there is any,' he said, with an effort.

'Brandy! oh, Mark, have you taken to drinking spirits, and so early in
the morning?' she asked, with an anxious misgiving that perhaps that
was _de rigueur_ with all literary men.

'No, no, don't be absurd. I want some just now, and quick, do you
hear? I caught a chill walking across,' he explained.

'You had better try to eat something with it, then,' she advised;
'have some cake?'

'Do you want to make me ill in earnest?' he retorted peevishly,
thrusting away the brown cake, with a stale flavour of cupboard about
it, with which Trixie tried to tempt him; 'there, it's all
right--there's nothing the matter, I tell you.' And he poured out the
brandy and drank it. There was a kind of comfort, or rather
distraction, in the mere physical sensation to his palate; he thought
he understood why some men took to drinking. 'Ha!' and he made a
melancholy attempt at th