For it read thus:
My darling Anita:
At the first glance of your brown eyes this afternoon, love was born in my heart. Life is worth living—with you in the world! And yet—
That was all. The unfinished letter had been crumpled into a ball and thrown in the basket. Had another been started—and completed? Had Anita Austin received it—and was that why she kept to her room for two days? Was she a—he hated the word! a vamp? Had she secretly become acquainted with John Waring during her presence in Corinth, and had so charmed him that he wrote to her thus? Or, had they known each other before? What a mystery!
There was not the slightest doubt of the writing. Lockwood knew it as well as he knew his own. And on top of all the other scraps in the waste-basket it must have been the last missive the dead man wrote—or, rather the last he threw away.
This meant he had been writing it on the Sunday evening. Then, Lockwood reasoned, knowing the routine, if he had written another, which he completed and addressed, it would, in natural course, have been put with the letters for the mail, and would have been posted by Ito that next morning.
What an oversight, never to have asked Ito about that matter.
It was an inviolable custom for the butler to take all letters laid on a certain small table, and put them in the pillar box, early in the morning.
Had Ito done this? It must be inquired into.
But far more absorbing was the actual letter before him. How could it be possible that John Waring, the dignified scholar, the confirmed bachelor, should have loved this mystery girl?