"Blanche never in her life wrote me a long letter, or any other letter, that I can recollect."
"Oh! When I saw it with my own eyes, and only yesterday, too! How can you deny it? In the morning she pretended she had a headache, and I went up to ask her how she was, and there on the table was a pink note, with three of the pages closely written over, and while I stayed she folded it into a cocked hat; and when I came home in the evening I went into your room—-this room—for some eau-de-Cologne, and it was lying there on the table under my nose," I wind up, with passionate vulgarity.
"I think you must be raving," says 'Duke, his own vehemence quieted by mine. "A letter—yet stay," a look of intelligence coming into his face; and, going over to a drawer he rummages there for a moment, and at length produces the very three-cornered note that has caused me so many jealous pangs. "Is this the note you mean?"
"Yes, it is," coming eagerly forward.
"I now recollect finding this in my room, when I returned from shooting yesterday. She asks me to do a commission for her, which, as it happens, quite slipped my memory until now. Take and read it, and see how just were your suspicions."
As I put out my hand, I know that I am acting meanly, but still I do take it, and, opening it, find my three closely-written pages have dwindled down to half a one. Five or six lines, carelessly scrawled, are before me.
"Are you satisfied?" asks 'Duke, who, half sitting on the table with folded arms, is watching me attentively.
"Yes," in a low voice; "I was wrong. This is not the note I saw with her. I now understand she must have meant that one for—for somebody else, and, knowing I saw it, sent this to you to blind me."
"More suspicions, Phyllis? As to what other charges you have brought against me, I can only swear that when I told you a year ago you were the only woman I had ever really loved, I spoke the truth."
"From all you have said to me to-night, I can scarcely imagine you would now repeat those words," I say, in trembling tones.