’I find on looking over my letter that I must add one word further.  It might seem that I am asking for a return of your friendship.  Such is not my purpose.  Neither can you forget that you have accused me,—­nor can I. What I expect is that you should tell me that you in your conduct to me have been wrong and that I in mine to you have been right.  I must be enabled to feel that the separation between us has come from injury done to me, and not by me.’

He did read the letter more than once, and read it with tingling ears, and hot cheeks, and a knitted brow.  As the letter went on, and as the woman’s sense of wrong grew hot from her own telling of her own story, her words became stronger and still stronger, till at last they were almost insolent in their strength.  Were it not that they came from one who did think herself to have been wronged, then certainly they would be insolent.  A sense of injury, a burning conviction of wrong sustained, will justify language which otherwise would be unbearable.  The Duke felt that, though his ears were tingling and his brow knitted, he could have forgiven the language, if only he could have admitted the argument.  He understood every word of it.  When she spoke of tenacity she intended to charge him with obstinacy.  Though she had dwelt but lightly on her own services she had made her thoughts on the matter clear enough.  ’I, Mrs Finn, who am nobody, have done much to succour and assist you, the Duke of Omnium; and this is the return which I have received!’ And then she told him to his face that unless he did something which it would be impossible that he should do, she would revoke her opinion of his honesty!  He tried to persuade himself that her opinion about his honesty was nothing to him;—­but he failed.  Her opinion was very much to him.  Though in his anger he had determined to throw her off from him, he knew her to be one whose good opinion was worth having.

Not a word of overt accusation had been made against his wife.  Every allusion to her was full of love.  But yet how heavy a charge was really made!  That such a secret should be kept from him, the father, was acknowledged to be a heinous fault;—­but the wife had known the secret and had kept it from him the father!  And then how wretched a thing it was for him that anyone should dare to write to him about the wife that had been taken away from him!  In spite of all her faults her name was so holy to him that it had never once passed his lips since her death, except in low whispers to himself,—­low whispers made in the perfect, double-guarded seclusion of his own chamber.  ‘Cora, Cora,’ he had murmured, so that the sense of the sound and not the sound itself had come to him from his own lips.  And now this woman wrote to him about her freely, as though there were nothing sacred, no religion in the memory of her.

’It was not for me to raise any question as to Mr Tregear’s fitness’.  Was it not palpable to all the world that he was unfit?  Unfit!  How could a man be more unfit?  He was asking for the hand of one who was second only to royalty—­who possessed of everything, who was beautiful, well-born, rich, who was the daughter of the Duke of Omnium, and he had absolutely nothing of his own to offer.