spare, you will
write, I hope, and tell me how you and the shop are going on. Emma sends
you her love, in which I beg to join." So the letter was expressed, and
so it ended.

"They needn't be afraid of my troubling them. Calm seas and
pleasure-boats! Stuff and nonsense!" Such was the first impression which
his wife's report of herself produced on Old Ronald's mind. After
a while, he looked at the letter again--and frowned, and reflected.
"Please let me hear of your visit beforehand," he repeated to himself,
as if the request had been, in some incomprehensible way, offensive to
him. He opened the drawer of his desk, and threw the letter into it.
When business was over for the day, he went to his club at the tavern,
and made himself unusually disagreeable to everybody.

A week passed. In the interval he wrote briefly to his wife. "I'm all
right, and the shop goes on as usual." He also forwarded one or two
letters which came for Mrs. Ronald. No more news reached him from
Ramsgate. "I suppose they're enjoying themselves," he reflected. "The
house looks queer without them; I'll go to the club."

He stayed later than usual, and drank more than usual, that night. It
was nearly one in the morning when he let himself in with his latch-key,
and went upstairs to bed.

Approaching the toilette-table, he found a letter lying on it, addressed
to "Mr. Ronald--private." It was not in his wife's handwriting; not in
any handwriting known to him. The characters sloped the wrong way, and
the envelope bore no postmark. He eyed it over and over suspiciously. At
last he opened it, and read these lines:

"You are advised by a true friend to lose no time in looking after your
wife. There are strange doings at the seaside. If you don't believe me,
ask Mrs. Turner, Number 1, Slains Row, Ramsgate."

No address, no date, no signature--an anonymous letter, the first he had
ever received in the long course of his life.

His hard brain was in no way affected by the liquor that he had drunk.
He sat down on his bed, mechanically folding and refolding the letter.
The reference to "Mrs. Turner" produced no impression on him of any
sort: no person of that name, common as it was, happened to be numbered
on the list of his friends or his customers. But for one circumstance,
he would have thrown the letter aside, in contempt. His memory reverted
to his wife's incomprehensible behaviour at parting. Addressing him
through that remembrance, the anonymou