at I should ever forgive you!" If only
she could have brought herself to end there! But her nature, which
the lover had greatly belied in likening it to her name, was not cold
enough for this. So she added a few more words very indiscreetly. "As
I want to explain to you why I can never see you again, I will meet
you on Thursday afternoon, at half-past four, a little way up Clapham
Lane, at the corner of the doctor's wall, just beyond the third
lamp." It was the first letter she had ever written to a lover, and
the poor girl had betrayed herself by keeping a copy of it.

And then Graham came to Mary Snow's letter to himself, which, as it
was short, the reader shall have entire.

MY DEAR MR. GRAHAM,

I never was so unhappy in my life, and I am sure I don't
know how to write to you. Of course I do not think you
will ever see me again unless it be to upbraid me for my
perfidy, and I almost hope you won't, for I should sink
into the ground before your eyes. And yet I didn't mean to
do anything very wrong, and when I did meet him I wouldn't
as much as let him take me by the hand;--not of my own
accord. I don't know what she has said to you, and I think
she ought to have let me read it; but she speaks to me now
in such a way that I don't know how to bear it. She has
rummaged among everything I have got, but I am sure she
could find nothing except those two letters. It wasn't my
fault that he wrote to me, though I know now I ought not
to have met him. He is quite a genteel young man, and very
respectable in the medical line; only I know that makes
no difference now, seeing how good you have been to me. I
don't ask you to forgive me, but it nearly kills me when I
think of poor papa.

Yours always, most unhappy, and very sorry for what I have
done,

MARY SNOW.

Poor Mary Snow! Could any man under such circumstances have been
angry with her? In the first place if men will mould their wives,
they must expect that kind of thing; and then, after all, was there
any harm done? If ultimately he did marry Mary Snow, would she make
a worse wife because she had met the apothecary's assistant at the
corner of the doctor's wall, under the third lamp-post? Graham, as he
sat with the letters before him, made all manner of excuses for her;
and this he did the more eagerly, because he felt that he would have
willingly made this affair a cause for breaking off his eng