Your affectionate friend,

   Henrietta Carbury.

‘Most affectionately your own Hetta’ would have been the form in which she would have wished to finish the first letter she had ever written to him.

Paul received it at Liverpool on the Wednesday morning, and on the Wednesday evening he was in Welbeck Street.  He had been quite aware that it had been incumbent on him to tell her the whole history of Mrs Hurtle.  He had meant to keep back—­almost nothing.  But it had been impossible for him to do so on that one occasion on which he had pleaded his love to her successfully.  Let any reader who is intelligent in such matters say whether it would have been possible for him then to have commenced the story of Mrs Hurtle and to have...