or pass into other hands.  Pecuniary loss was the least vexatious part of the affair.  Morphew, reckless in the ruin of his dearest hope, would seek excitement, try once more to enrich himself by gambling, and so go down to the depths whence there is no rescue.  As a last hope, Harvey had written to Henrietta Winter a long letter of all but passionate appeal; for answer he received a few lines, infinitely sorrowful, but of inflexible resolve.  ’In the sight of God, Mr. Morphew already has a wife.  I should be guilty of a crime if I married him.’  With a desperate ejaculation, Rolfe crushed up the sheet of paper, and turned to other things.

Whilst she was at Greystone, Alma heard again from Felix Dymes, his letter having been forwarded.  He wrote that Mrs. Strangeways was about to return to England, and that before long she might be heard of at a certain hotel in London.  As this letter had escaped Harvey’s notice, Alma was spared the necessity of shaping a fiction about it.  Glad of this, and all but decided to put Mrs. Strangeways utterly out of her life and mind, she sent no answer.

But when she had been back again for some weeks at Gunnersbury; when a house at Greystone was taken (though it would not be ready for them till Michaelmas); when she was endeavouring, day after day, to teach Hughie, and to manage her servants, and to support a wavering hope, there arrived one morning a letter from Mrs. Strangeways.  It was dated from the hotel which Dymes had mentioned, and it asked Alma to call there.  A simple, friendly invitation, suggestive of tea and chat.  Alma did not speak of it, and for an hour or two thought she could disregard it altogether.  But that evening she talked to Harvey of shopping she had to do in town, and the following afternoon she called upon Mrs. Strangeways.

A lift carried her to the topmost, or all but topmost, storey of the vast hotel, swarming, murmurous.  She entered a small sitting-room, pretentiously comfortless, and from a chair by the open window —­ for it was a day of hot sunshine —­ Mrs. Strangeways rose to greet her; quite in the old way, smiling with head aside, cooing rapidly an effusive welcome.  Alma looked round to see that the door was shut; then, declining the offered hand, she said coldly ——­

‘You are mistaken if you think I have come as a friend.’

’Oh!  I am so sorry to hear you say that.  Do sit down, and let me hear all about it.  I have so looked forward to seeing you.’

‘I am only here to ask what good it can do you to talk ill of me.’

‘I really don’t understand.  I am quite at a loss.’

’But I know for certain that you have tried to injure me by telling extraordinary falsehoods.’

Mrs. Strangeways regarded her with an air of gently troubled deprecation.

‘Oh, you have been grievously misled.  Who can have told you this?’

‘The name doesn’t matter.  I have no doubt of the fact.’