her husband, profiting by the example so signally given him of the fatal effect of a want of character, left the letter, the drop too much, unanswered.  The letter, an incredible one, addressed by Saltram to Wimbledon during a stay with the Pudneys at Ramsgate, was the central feature of the incident, which, however, had many features, each more painful than whichever other we compared it with.  The Pudneys had behaved shockingly, but that was no excuse.  Base ingratitude, gross indecency—one had one’s choice only of such formulas as that the more they fitted the less they gave one rest.  These are dead aches now, and I am under no obligation, thank heaven, to be definite about the business.  There are things which if I had had to tell them—well, would have stopped me off here altogether.

I went abroad for the general election, and if I don’t know how much, on the Continent, I forgot, I at least know how much I missed, him.  At a distance, in a foreign land, ignoring, abjuring, unlearning him, I discovered what he had done for me.  I owed him, oh unmistakeably, certain noble conceptions; I had lighted my little taper at his smoky lamp, and lo it continued to twinkle.  But the light it gave me just showed me how much more I wanted.  I was pursued of course by letters from Mrs. Saltram which I didn’t scruple not to read, though quite aware her embarrassments couldn’t but be now of the gravest.  I sacrificed to propriety by simply putting them away, and this is how, one day as my absence drew to an end, my eye, while I rummaged in my desk for another paper, was caught by a name on a leaf that had detached itself from the packet.  The allusion was to Miss Anvoy, who, it appeared, was engaged to be married to Mr. George Gravener; and the news was two months old.  A direct question of Mrs. Saltram’s had thus remained unanswered—she had enquired of me in a postscript what sort of man this aspirant to such a hand might be.  The great other fact about him just then was that he had been triumphantly returned for Clockborough in the interest of the party that had swept the country—so that I might easily have referred Mrs. Saltram to the journals of the day.  Yet when I at last wrote her that I was coming home and would discharge my accumulated burden by seeing her, I but remarked in regard to her question that she must really put it to Miss Anvoy.

VI

I had almost avoided the general election, but some of its consequences, on my return, had smartly to be faced.  The season, in London, began to breathe again and to flap its folded wings.  Confidence, under the new Ministry, was understood to be reviving, and one of the symptoms, in a social body, was a recovery of appetite.  People once more fed together, and it happened that, one Saturday night, at somebody’s house, I fed with George Gravener.  When the ladies left the room I moved up to where he sat and begged to congratulate him.  “On my election?” he asked after a moment; so that I could feign, jocosely, not to have heard of that triumph and to be alluding to the rumour of a victory still more personal.  I dare say I coloured however, for his political success had momentarily passed out of my mind.  What was present to it was that he was to marry that beautiful girl; and yet his question made me conscious of some discomposure—I hadn’t intended to put this before everything.  He himself indeed ought gracefully to have done so, and I remember thinking the whole man was in this assumption that in expressing my sense of what he had won I had fixed my thoughts on his “seat.”  We straightened the matter out, and he was so much lighter in hand than I had lately seen him that his spirits might well have been fed from a twofold source.  He was so good as to say that he hoped I should soon make the acquaintance of Miss Anvoy, who, with her aunt, was presently coming up to town.  Lady Coxon, in the country, had been seriously unwell, and this had delayed their arrival.  I told him I had heard the marriage would be a splendid one; on which, brightened and humanised by his luck, he laughed and said “Do you mean for her?”  When I had again explained what I meant he went on: “Oh she’s an American, but you’d scarcely know it; unless, perhaps,” he added, “by her being used to more money than most girls in England, even the daughters of rich men.  That wouldn’t in the least do for a fellow like me, you know, if it wasn’t for the great liberality of her father.  He really has been most kind, and everything’s quite satisfactory.”  He added that his eldest brother had taken a tremendous fancy to her and that during a recent visit at Coldfield she had nearly won over Lady Maddock.  I gathered from something he dropped later on that the free-handed gentleman beyond the seas had not made a settlement, but had given a handsome present and was apparently to be looked to, across the water, for other favours.  People are simplified alike by great contentments and great yearnings, and, whether or no it was Gravener’s directness that begot my own, I seem to recall that in some turn taken by our talk he almost imposed it on me as an act of decorum to ask if Miss Anvoy had also by chance expectations from her aunt.  My enquiry drew out that Lady Coxon, who was the oddest of women, would have in any contingency to act under her late husband’s will, which was odder still, saddling her with a mass of queer obligations complicated with queer loopholes.  There were several dreary people, Coxon cousins, old maids, to whom she would have more or less to minister.  Gravener laughed, without saying no, when I suggested that the young lady might come in through a loophole; then suddenly, as if he suspected my turning a lantern on him, he declared quite dryly: “That’s all rot—one’s moved by other springs!”

A fortnight later, at Lady Coxon’s own house, I understood well enough the springs one was moved by.  Gravener had spoken of me there as an old friend, and I received a gracious invitation to dine.  The Knight’s widow was again indisposed—she had succumbed at the eleventh hour; so that I found Miss Anvoy bravely playing hostess without even Gravener’s help, since, to make matters worse, he had just sent up word that the House, the insatiable House, with which he supposed he had contracted for easier terms, positively declined to release him.  I was struck with the courage, the grace and gaiety of the young lady left thus to handle the fauna and flora of the Regent’s Park.  I did what I could to help her to classify them, after I had recovered from the confusion of seeing her slightly disconcerted at perceiving in the guest introduced by her intended the gentleman with whom she had had that talk about Frank Saltram.  I had at this moment my first glimpse of the fact that she was a person who could carry a responsibility; but I leave the reader to judge of my sense of the aggravation, for either of us, of such a burden, when I heard the servant announce Mrs. Saltram.  From what immediately passed between the two ladies I gathered that the latter had been sent for post-haste to fill the gap created by the absence of the mistress of the house.  “Good!” I remember crying, “she’ll be put by me;” and my apprehension was promptly justified.  Mrs. Saltram taken in to dinner, and taken in as a consequence of an appeal to her amiability, was Mrs. Saltram with a vengeance.  I asked myself what Miss Anvoy meant by doing such things, but the only answer I arrived at was that Gravener was verily fortunate.  She hadn’t happened to tell him of her visit to Upper Baker Street, but she’d certainly tell him to-morrow; not indeed that this would make him like any better her having had the innocence to invite such a person as Mrs. Saltram on such an occasion.  It could only strike me that I had never seen a young woman put such ignorance into her cleverness, such