a manner.  My gratitude took the form of wretchedness when, on hearing the effect of the ballad in public this evening, I thought that I had not power to withhold a reply which might do us both more harm than good.  Then I said, “Away with all emotion—­I wish the world was drained dry of it—­I will take no notice,” when a lady whispered at my elbow to the effect that of course I had expressed my gratification to you.  I ought first to have mentioned that your creation has been played to-night to full drawing-rooms, and the original tones cooled the artificial air like a fountain almost.

   ’I prophesy great things of you.  Perhaps, at the time when we are
   each but a row of bones in our individual graves, your genius will be
   remembered, while my mere cleverness will have been long forgotten.

’But—­you must allow a woman of experience to say this—­the undoubted power that you possess will do you socially no good unless you mix with it the ingredient of ambition—­a quality in which I fear you are very deficient.  It is in the hope of stimulating you to a better opinion of yourself that I write this letter.

’Probably I shall never meet you again.  Not that I think circumstances to be particularly powerful to prevent such a meeting, rather it is that I shall energetically avoid it.  There can be no such thing as strong friendship between a man and a woman not of one family.

’More than that there must not be, and this is why we will not meet.  You see that I do not mince matters at all; but it is hypocrisy to avoid touching upon a subject which all men and women in our position inevitably think of, no matter what they say.  Some women might have written distantly, and wept at the repression of their real feeling; but it is better to be more frank, and keep a dry eye.—­Yours, Ethelberta.’

Her feet felt cold and her heart weak as she directed the letter, and she was overpowered with weariness.  But murmuring, ’If I let it stay till the morning I shall not send it, and a man may be lost to fame because of a woman’s squeamishness—­it shall go,’ she partially dressed herself, wrapped a large cloak around her, descended the stairs, and went out to the pillar-box at the corner, leaving the door not quite close.  No gust of wind had realized her misgivings that it might be blown shut on her return, and she re-entered as softly as she had emerged.

It will be seen that Ethelberta had said nothing about her family after all.

10.  Lady Petherwin’s house

The next day old Lady Petherwin, who had not accompanied Ethelberta the night before, came into the morning-room, with a newspaper in her hand.

‘What does this mean, Ethelberta?’ she inquired in tones from which every shade of human expressiveness was extracted by some awful and imminent mood that lay behind.  She was pointing to a paragraph under the heading of ‘Literary Notes,’ which contained in a few words the announcement of Ethelberta’s authorship that had more circumstantially appeared in the Wessex Reflector.