“But such an odd letter!  It may require an immediate answer; or is some begging petition, perhaps.  Get on with your breakfast.”

Lady Mount Severn opened the letter, and with some difficulty spelt through its contents.  They shocked even her.

“How dreadful!” she uttered, in the impulse of the moment.

“What is dreadful?” asked Lord Vane, looking up from his breakfast.

“Lady Isabel—­Isabel Vane—­you have not forgotten her?”

“Forgotten her!” he echoed.  “Why, mamma, I must possess a funny memory to have forgotten her already.”

“She is dead.  She has been killed in a railway accident in France.”

His large blue eyes, honest and true as they had been in childhood, filled, and his face flushed.  He said nothing, for emotion was strong within him.

“But, shocking as it is, it is better for her,” went on the countess; “for, poor creature what could her future life had been?”

“Oh, don’t say it!” impetuously broke out the young viscount.  “Killed in a railway accident, and for you to say that it is better for her!”

“So it is better,” said the countess.  “Don’t go into heroics, William.  You are quite old enough to know that she had brought misery upon herself, and disgrace upon all connected with her.  No one could ever have taken notice of her again.”

“I would,” said the boy, stoutly.

Lady Mount Severn smiled derisively.

“I would.  I never liked anybody in the world half so much as I liked Isabel.”

“That’s past and gone.  You would not have continued to like her, after the disgrace she wrought.”

“Somebody else wrought more of the disgrace than she did; and, had I been a man, I would have shot him dead,” flashed the viscount.

“You don’t know anything about it.”

“Don’t I!” returned he, not over dutifully.  But Lady Mount Severn had not brought him up to be dutiful.

“May I read the letter, mamma?” he demanded, after a pause.

“If you can read it,” she replied, tossing it to him.  “It is written in the strangest style; syllables divided, and the words running one into the other.  She wrote it herself when she was dying.”

Lord Vane took the letter to a window, and stayed looking over it for some time; the countess ate an egg and a plate of ham meanwhile.  Presently he came back with it folded, and laid in on the table.

“You will forward it to papa to-day,” he observed.

“I shall forward it to him.  But there’s no hurry; and I don’t exactly know where your papa may be.  I shall send the notice of her death to the papers; and I am glad to do it; it is a blight removed from the family.”

“Mamma, I do think you are the unkindest woman that ever breathed!”

“I’ll give you something to call me unkind for, if you don’t mind,” retorted the countess, her color rising.  “Dock you of your holiday, and pack you back to school to-day.”