"Madam,—I have a message for my Lord the Earl from my Lady the late Countess. You will understand why I never gave it before, and I cannot tell why I give it now, save that there seems no reason for withholding it, and it may ease you of some pain you have not deserved. My lord's Brother was guiltless in the matter of the duel; it was the Countess who unloaded the pistol; she followed to the Park, being, I take it, half Crazed, and when she was disappointed of her design to compass my lord's Death she took her own life. First she bid me tell the truth, and here you have it to use for any end you will.
"With it, Madam, accept my Advice. The Earl whom you favour has nothing in him; Marius Lyndwood is a better man, albeit a straight-laced fellow and not so pretty; let my Lord alone and take the brother.
"Madam, your servant,"
"Honoria Pryse."
There was no address and no date on the letter, which had come through the threepenny post; Susannah folded it again and replaced it in the desk.
An extraordinary epistle and one that she could not dismiss from her mind; at first she had called its nature insolence, now it seemed to her to contain a strange kind of sincerity; she could not believe that the writer meant her harm.
And it was the truth. Marius was the better man; but she——
Miss Chressham checked herself with a smile. It was not her part to be thinking of herself; her own feelings, her own views had been repressed all her life; she was for ever acting for others, shielding others, defending others, encouraging others; who cared what she might feel or what passion might lie beneath her calm? No one excepting Marius.
Excepting Marius!
Well, it was her own perversity, her own misfortune that she could not take the only affection that had been offered her.
She firmly turned her thoughts from her own affairs and proceeded to write to Selina Boyle.
But the words would not come; sheet after sheet was torn up and thrown aside: one sentence sounded foolish, another blunt, a third had no meaning.