Our talk flagged and the fire grew gray in its flaky ashes before Fanny again appeared.

“I know, papa, you think me very rude to keep Mr. Munro so long waiting, but there were some special directions to go with the packet, and it took me a long time to get them right.  It is for Bessie, papa—­Bessie Stewart, Mr. Munro’s dear little fiancee.”

Escaping as quickly as possible from Mr. Meyrick’s neatly turned felicitations—­and that the satisfaction he expressed was genuine I was prepared to believe—­hurried home to Sackville street.

My bedroom was always smothering in its effect on me—­close draperies to the windows, heavy curtains around the bed—­and I closed the door and lighted my candle with a sinking heart.

The packet was simply a long letter, folded thickly in several wrappers and tied with a string.  The letter opened abruptly: 

“What I am going to do I am sure no woman on earth ever did before me, nor would I save to undo the trouble I have most innocently made.  What must you have thought of me that day at Lenox, staying close all day to two engaged people, who must have wished me away a thousand times?  But I did not dream you were engaged.

“Remember, I had just come over from Saratoga, and knew nothing of Lenox gossip, then or afterward.  Something in your manner once or twice made me look at you and think that perhaps you were interested in Bessie, but hers to you was so cold, so distant, that I thought it was only a notion of my jealous self.

“Was I foolish to lay so much stress on that anniversary time?  Do you know that the year before we had spent it together, too?—­September 28th.  True, that year it was at Bertie Cox’s funeral, but we had walked together, and I was happy in being near you.

“For, you see, it was from something more than the Hudson River that you had brought me out.  You had rescued me from the stupid gayety of my first winter—­from the flats of fashionable life.  You had given me an ideal—­something to live up to and grow worthy of.

“Let that pass.  For myself, it is nothing, but for the deeper harm I have done, I fear, to Bessie and to you.

“Again, on that day at Lenox, when Bessie and I drove together in the afternoon, I tried to make her talk about you, to find out what you were to her.  But she was so distant, so repellant, that I fancied there was nothing at all between you; or, rather, if you had cared for her at all, that she had been indifferent to you.

“Indeed, she quite forbade the subject by her manner; and when she told me you were going abroad, I could not help being very happy, for I thought then that I should have you all to myself.

“When I saw you on shipboard, I fancied, somehow, that you had changed your passage to be with us.  It was very foolish; and I write it, thankful that you are not here to see me.  So I scribbled a little note to Bessie, and sent it off by the pilot:  I don’t know where you were when the pilot went.  This is, as nearly as I remember it, what I wrote: