One great physician said to me, with truth: 

“For the poor lady’s sake I could almost hope she will remain in her present state.  She is happy and quite harmless, whereas she would suffer agonies of grief should she recover.”

I tried to take this view, and after making every possible arrangement for her comfort and attendance I left for London.  There was a great deal of business to be seen about in connection with the will.

Lady Tilchester had telegraphed at once all her sympathy, and I got numbers of letters from all sorts of people.

Among them Lady Grenellen!  A beautifully expressed note, full of the friendliest sympathy.

When I got back to Ledstone, after my week in London, I found quantities of letters and bills had accumulated for Augustus.  His lawyers were coming down the next day to sort and settle everything.  They had been piled up in the smoking-room.

I sadly glanced through them as they lay.  Oh, I am not a hypocrite to say that when I first went back into this room, full of tipsy horrors as its associations were, it brought Augustus back so vividly that I sat down and cried.

I had never wished him ill, and would have given him back his life if I could.  To die so young, with everything to make existence fair!  It seemed too sad.

I lifted the pile of papers, one after another, and at last came upon one with the address printed on the outside of the envelope—­the address of the dress-maker where Lady Grenellen’s clothes came from.

This bill the lawyers should not see.  I looked carefully to the end of the pile.  There were no more of any consequence.  I wished I could find her letters too, to save them also.  The drawers were all locked.  I could not think that night what to do, but when the lawyers came next day I asked them to give me any letters they might find with the same writing on the envelope as the one I showed them—­her note of sympathy to me—­and not to examine them.

And so it was that a day or two afterwards I had before me six letters with a gold coronet emblazoned upon the envelopes.

I had paid the bill.  I wrote the check and despatched it the night I found it, and now the receipt also lay beside the letters.  I tied them together and sealed the bundle with Augustus’s seal.  I put the receipted bill with them, and enclosed the whole packet in another envelope, and addressed it to Lady Grenellen.

I had not answered her letter of sympathy.  This would be my answer.

A thick skin is a fortunate gift, it appears, and one I had thought of extreme rareness in the class to which she belongs.  What was my surprise to receive a gushing letter of thanks by return of post!  My husband and she had been such friends, she said, and he had helped her before so kindly out of her difficulties, and it was too good of me to have paid this bill—­she could see by the date I must have paid it—­and it all was too sad, and she hoped we should meet later on, perhaps at Harley!  Her own husband was coming home, slightly wounded, she added.