you as a lover nor yet as an Under-Secretary.

But I think ever so much of you as both;--I do, indeed;
and I am not scolding you a bit. As long as I can have two
or three dear, sweet, loving words, I shall be as happy as
a queen. Ah, if you knew it all! But you never can know
it all. A man has so many other things to learn that he
cannot understand it.

Good-bye, dear, dear, dearest man. Whatever you do I shall
be quite sure you have done the best.

Ever your own, with all the love of her heart,

MARY F. JONES.

This was very nice. Such a man as was Phineas Finn always takes a
delight which he cannot express even to himself in the receipt of
such a letter as this. There is nothing so flattering as the warm
expression of the confidence of a woman's love, and Phineas thought
that no woman ever expressed this more completely than did his Mary.
Dear, dearest Mary. As for giving her up, as for treachery to one so
trusting, so sweet, so well beloved, that was out of the question.
But nevertheless the truth came home to him more clearly day by day,
that he of all men was the last who ought to have given himself up to
such a passion. For her sake he ought to have abstained. So he told
himself now. For her sake he ought to have kept aloof from her;--and
for his own sake he ought to have kept aloof from Mr. Monk. That very
day, with Mary's letter in his pocket, he went to the livery stables
and explained that he would not keep his horse any longer. There was
no difficulty about the horse. Mr. Howard Macleod of the Treasury
would take him from that very hour. Phineas, as he walked away,
uttered a curse upon Mr. Howard Macleod. Mr. Howard Macleod was just
beginning the glory of his life in London, and he, Phineas Finn, was
bringing his to an end.

With Mary's letter in his pocket he went up to Portman Square. He had
again got into the habit of seeing Lady Laura frequently, and was
often with her brother, who now again lived at his father's house.
A letter had reached Lord Brentford, through his lawyer, in which a
demand was made by Mr. Kennedy for the return of his wife. She was
quite determined that she would never go back to him; and there had
come to her a doubt whether it would not be expedient that she should
live abroad so as to be out of the way of persecution from her
husband. Lord Brentford was in great wrath, and Lord Chiltern had
once or twice hinted that perhaps he had better