"You are mistaken if you imagine any relationship to exist between Ernie and myself," I answered, calmly, never dreaming at the moment of covert or intended insult. "I might as well inform you at once, that I am Miss, not Mrs. Monfort; you should be guarded how you make mistakes of that nature."
And my eye flashed fire, I felt, for I now heard him chuckling low in the shadow, in which he so carefully concealed himself.
"I shall remembair vat you say," he observed, "and try to do bettair next visit; but all dis time I delay in de execution of my mission here. See, I have brought you von lettair; now vat will you do to reward me?"
Holding it high above my head, in a manner meant, no doubt, to be playful, and to suggest a game of snatch, perhaps, such as his peers might have afforded him, he displayed his treasure to my longing eyes, but I sat with folded arms.
"If the letter brings me good news, I shall thank you warmly, Dr. Englehart; if not, I shall try to believe you unconscious of its contents."
"Tanks from your lips would, indeed, seem priceless," he remarked, courteously, as with many bows and shrugs he laid it on the table before me, bringing his shaggy head by such means much closer to my hand than I cared to know it should be, under any circumstances.
With a gesture of inexpressible disgust, regretted the next moment, as I reflected that, to bring me this letter, he might be overstepping common rules, I raised the envelope to the light and recognized, to my intense disappointment, the well-known characters of Bainrothe's—small, rigid, neat, constrained.
My heart, which a moment before had beat audibly to my own ear, sank like a stone in my breast, and I sat for a time holding the letter mutely, uncertain how to proceed. Should I return it unread, and thus hurl the gauntlet in the traitor's face, or be governed by expedience (word ever so despised by me of old), and trace the venom of the viper, by his trail, back to his native den?
After a brief conflict of feeling, I determined on the wiser course—that of self-humiliation as a measure of profound policy.
I broke the seal, the well-known "dove-and-vulture" effigy which he called in heraldry "The quarry" and claimed as his rightful crest. Very significantly, indeed, did it strike me now, though I had jested on the subject so merrily of old with Evelyn and George Gaston.