n. At the end
of the second, a crowded line, the word _not_ was blurred on the
paper-edge, and looked like a repetition of the previous word.

One does not see without thought, why this letter sent its reader's
heart beating furiously. Why should she turn scarlet with anger and all
but draw blood from a bitten lip? She knew perfectly well that this
gutter Don Juan's depravity could boast as many victims as his enforced
prison life had left possible to him. But no particular one had ever
become concrete to her, and jealousy of a multitude, no one better off
than herself, had never rankled. Jealousy of Heaven-knows-who is a
wishy-washy passion. Supply a definite object, and it may become
vitriolic. Polly Daverill, whoever she was, was definite, and might be
the wife the convict had acknowledged--or rather claimed--when he first
made Miss Julia's acquaintance, over twenty years ago.

The lip was perhaps saved from bloodletting by an idea which crossed the
mind of the biter. A look of satisfaction grew and grew as she
contemplated the letter; not for its meaning--that was soon clear. It
was something in the handwriting; something that made her hide
half-words with a finger-point, and vary her angle of inspection. Then
she said, aloud to herself:--"Yes!" as though she had come to a
decision.

She examined an inkstand that the dried ink of ages had encrusted,
beyond redemption, in a sunken cavity of restraint in an inktray
overstocked with extinct and senile pens. Its residuum of black fluid
had been glutinous ever since Miss Julia had known it; ever since she
had written, as a student, that Bounty Commanded Esteem all down one
page of a copybook. The pens were quill pens past mending, or
overwhelmed by too heartfelt nibs; or magnum bonums whose upstrokes were
morally as wide as Portland Place, or parvum malums that perforated
syllables and spluttered. The penwiper was non-absorbent, and generally
contrived to return the drop it refused to partake of on the hands of
incautious scribes, who rarely obtained soap and hot water time enough
to do any good.

Miss Julia first remedied the ink. A memory of breakfast unremoved still
hung about the parlour table--a teapot and a slop basin. The former
supplied a diluent, the latter a haven for the indisputably used-up
quill whose feather served to incorporate it with the black coagulum.
With the resultant fluid you could make a mark about the same blackness
as what the letter was,