on? I shall be glad to hear, by return of post
if possible, how the matter strikes you. If you could make it convenient
to consult with me personally in Edinburgh, we should save time,
when time may be of serious importance to us. While you are at Doctor
Starkweather's you are within easy reach of this place. Please think of
it."

I thought of it seriously enough. The foremost question which I had to
consider was the question of my husband.

The departure of the mother and son from Spain had been so long delayed,
by the surgeon's orders, that the travelers had only advanced on their
homeward journey as far as Bordeaux, when I had last heard from Mrs.
Macallan three or four days since. Allowing for an interval of repose at
Bordeaux, and for the slow rate at which they would be compelled to
move afterward, I might still expect them to arrive in England some time
before a letter from the agent in America could reach Mr. Playmore.
How, in this position of affairs, I could contrive to join the lawyer in
Edinburgh, after meeting my husband in London, it was not easy to see.
The wise and the right way, as I thought, was to tell Mr. Playmore
frankly that I was not mistress of my Own movements, and that he had
better address his next letter to me at Benjamin's house.

Writing to my legal adviser in this sense, I had a word of my own to add
on the subject of the torn letter.

In the last years of my father's life I had traveled with him in Italy,
and I had seen in the Museum at Naples the wonderful relics of a bygone
time discovered among the ruins of Pompeii. By way of encouraging Mr.
Playmore, I now reminded him that the eruption which had overwhelmed the
town had preserved, for more than sixteen hundred years, such perishable
things as the straw in which pottery had been packed; the paintings on
house walls; the dresses worn by the inhabitants; and (most noticeable
of all, in our case) a piece of ancient paper, still attached to the
volcanic ashes which had fallen over it. If these discoveries had been
made after a lapse of sixteen centuries, under a layer of dust and ashes
on a large scale, surely we might hope to meet with similar cases of
preservation, after a lapse of three or four years only, under a layer
of dust and ashes on a small scale. Taking for granted (what was perhaps
doubtful enough) that the fragments of the letter could be recovered, my
own conviction was that the writing on them, though it might be faded,