"Dear Neaera: I am afraid that the facts which have come to my knowledge leave no doubt as to your being responsible for the attack on the House of Detention. You are charged, too, with having tampered with Chairo's carriage in order to prevent his escape with Lydia. Shall I investigate this matter, or would it not perhaps be better for you to turn over the leaf and start a clean page somewhere else? I am prepared to do what is needful in order to make this easy to you, and send you by the messenger who hands this to you money for your immediate necessities. Should you wish your mother to accompany you, I shall provide for her also. Meanwhile, of course, we can arrange to undo the marriage that was somewhat hastily celebrated.
"Yours,
"Masters."
Neaera was not far from New York. She and her mother were both occupying a cottage belonging to Masters in New Jersey, behind the Palisades. Her mother was a widow and a cipher. She had been a helpless spectator of her daughter's too brilliant adventures, and was accustomed to sudden changes.
When Neaera received Masters's letter she sent word to him she would be in New York that night. Masters on receiving the message packed a small portmanteau and went to Boston, leaving word with his aunt, who kept house for him, to receive Neaera should she arrive.
Masters was unwilling to subject himself to a scene with Neaera. While his messenger was away evidence had been presented to him which left no doubt as to Neaera having tampered with Chairo's carriage; and this was more than sufficient as a last straw. He felt he had been unaccountably weak in his previous personal encounters with her and that she was now counting upon this weakness. It is not easy for a man to turn a woman out of his house, nor to hand over to the authorities a political refugee who has entrusted herself to his care. To keep Neaera in his rooms under the circumstances would have been consistent neither with what he owed the state nor with what he owed himself. He trusted, therefore, to Neaera's intelligence to conclude from his departure that his decision was irrevocable.
Meanwhile, Lydia had left Tyringham and returned to New York. This had not happened without considerable negotiation, for it had been part of the understanding upon which Chairo had been released on parole that Lydia was to remain away from New York. The intention of this arrangement was to prevent Chairo from further compromising Lydia, pending the determination of his case. But Lydia had been of late so much disturbed by Chairo's letters that she had come to a decision which she proceeded at once, if possible, to carry out, and as a first step toward doing so, it was indispensable that she should go to New York.
She sent, therefore, to Iréné the letter from Chairo which had particularly exercised her and asked Iréné whether, under the circumstances, she could not once more be received at the cloister, no longer as a Demetrian but as one in retreat, in order that she might concert with Iréné and other members of the council as to the course she proposed to pursue.
The letter from Chairo—or rather the extract from it—which she sent to Iréné ran as follows:
"I could ask no one but you to believe how differently my own acts appear to me when I looked back upon them some weeks ago with the glamour that self-deception threw around them and when I hear them to-day coldly recited in the witness box. During the examination I have asked myself whether the witnesses I have heard testifying before the investigating committee were really telling about me, or were not rather telling of events which have happened only in a nightmare. And when I push my self-examination further, I see that the difference lies in this: At the time I prepared our forces for violence I was thinking of myself; now, I am thinking of you.