f my mistress smacks my cheek
with one hand, she gives me handkerchiefs to wipe it with the other.
My good mistress, my kind mistress, my pretty mistress! I, the servant,
bear malice against her, the mistress! Ah! you bad man, even to think of
such a thing! Ah! fie, fie! I am quite ashamed of you!"

She gave me one look--the wickedest look I ever saw, and burst out
laughing--the harshest laugh I ever heard from a woman's lips. Turning
away from me directly after, she said no more, and never referred to the
subject again on any subsequent occasion.

From that time, however, I noticed an alteration in Miss Josephine;
not in her way of doing her work, for she was just as sharp and careful
about it as ever, but in her manners and habits. She grew amazingly
quiet, and passed almost all her leisure time alone. I could bring no
charge against her which authorized me to speak a word of warning;
but, for all that, I could not help feeling that if I had been in my
mistress's place, I would have followed up the present of the cambric
handkerchiefs by paying her a month's wages in advance, and sending her
away from the house the same evening.

With the exception of this little domestic matter, which appeared
trifling enough at the time, but which led to very serious consequences
afterward, nothing happened at all out of the ordinary way during
the six weary weeks to which I have referred. At the beginning of the
seventh week, however, an event occurred at last.

One morning the postman brought a letter to the Hall addressed to my
mistress. I took it upstairs, and looked at the direction as I put it on
the salver. The handwriting was not my master's; was not, as it appeared
to me, the handwriting of any well-educated person. The outside of the
letter was also very dirty, and the seal a common office-seal of the
usual lattice-work pattern. "This must be a begging-letter," I thought
to myself as I entered the breakfast-room and advanced with it to my
mistress.

She held up her hand before she opened it as a sign to me that she had
some order to give, and that I was not to leave the room till I had
received it. Then she broke the seal and began to read the letter.

Her eyes had hardly been on it a moment before her face turned as pale
as death, and the paper began to tremble in her fingers. She read on to
the end, and suddenly turned from pale to scarlet, started out of her
chair, crumpled the letter up violently in her hand, and