"Ho, do I, my lady! Can't you indeed? Perhaps your ladyship will understand better when I tell her, that that same bold thing had no lace at all—but a letter. 'Give it to your mistress,' says she, 'in secret, and for your life don't let Sir Jasper see it.'"
"Well, give it to me," said Lady Standish, "and hold your tongue, and go and pack your trunks as soon as you like."
"Ho, my lady," cried the incorruptible Megrim, with an acid laugh, "I hope I know my Christian duty better. I brought the letter to my master, according to the Voice of Conscience. And now," she concluded, with a shrill titter, "I'll go and pack my trunks."
Yet she paused, expecting to enjoy Lady Standish's outburst of terror and distress. There was no sign from the bed, however, not even a little gasp. And so Mistress Megrim was fain to depart to her virtuous trunks without even that parting solace.
Meanwhile, with the pillow of her spotless conscience to rest upon, and deadened to fresh disturbances by the despairing reflection that nothing for the present could make matters much worse between her and her husband, Lady Standish, without attempting to solve the fresh problem, determinedly closed her weary eyes upon the troubles of the world and drifted into slumber again.
*****
"I shall catch them red-handed," said Sir Jasper.
This time all doubt was over: in his hand lay the proof, crisp and fluttering. He read it again and again, with a kind of ghastly joy. Unaddressed, unsealed, save by a foolish green wafer with a cupid on it, the document which Mistress Megrim's rigid sense of duty had delivered to him instead of to his guilty wife, was indited in the self-same dashing hand as marked the crumpled rag that even now burned him through his breast-pocket like a fly-blister.
"I never got a wink of sleep, dreaming of you, dearest dear, so soon to be my own at last! The chay shall be drawn by horses such as Phoebus himself, my darling, would have envied. And, so you fail me not, we shall soon be dashing through the night—a world of nothing but happiness and love before us. I could find it in my heart to bless the poor foolish individual who shall be nameless, since, had it not been for my lovely one's weariness of him, she might never have turned to the arms of her own devoted,
RED CURL!