e and come in for
five minutes on your way home, and tell me all about it. I know you
pass the end of the square, so it won't be out of your way.--Yours
very sincerely, V. H."

After writing this note Lady Holme hesitated for a moment, then she went
to a writing table, opened a drawer and took out a tiny, flat key. She
enclosed it in two sheets of thick note paper, folded the note also
round it, and put it into an envelope which she carefully closed.
After writing Leo Ulford's name on the envelope she rang again for the
footman.

"Take this to Eaton Square," she said, naming the number of the house.
"And give it to Mr. Ulford yourself. Go in a hansom. When you have given
Mr. Ulford the note come straight back in the hansom and let me know.
After that you can go to bed. Do you understand?"

"Yes, my lady."

The man went out.

Lady Holme stood up to give him the note. She remained standing after he
had gone. An extraordinary sensation of relief had come to her. Action
had lessened her pain, had removed much of the pressure of emotion upon
her heart. For a moment she felt almost happy.

She sat down again and took up a book. It was a book of poems written by
a very young girl whom she knew. There was a great deal about sorrow in
the poems, and sorrow was always alluded to as a person; now flitting
through a forest in the autumn among the dying leaves, now bending over
a bed, now walking by the sea at sunset watching departing ships, now
standing near the altar at a wedding. The poems were not good. On the
other hand, they were not very bad.

They had some grace, some delicacy here and there, now and then a touch
of real, if by no means exquisite, sentiment. At this moment Lady Holme
found them soothing. There was a certain music in them and very little
reality. They seemed to represent life as a pensive phantasmagoria
of bird songs, fading flowers, dying lights, soft winds and rains and
sighing echoes.

She read on and on. Sometimes a hard thought intruded itself upon her
mind--the thought of Leo Ulford with the latch-key of her husband's
house in his hand. That thought made the poems seem to her remarkably
unlike life.

She looked at the clock. The footman had been away long enough to do his
errand. Just as she was thinking this he came into the room.

"Well?" she said.

"I gave Mr. Ulford the note, my lady."

"Then you can go to bed. Good-night. I'll put out the lights here."

"Thank you, my l