"Dear Mr. Hanbury,
"I have been thinking a great deal of the talk we had last night after dinner, and I have come to the conclusion that it was all for the best. We should never be able to agree. I think the least said now the better. Our engagement has not been announced to anyone. Nothing need be said about its being broken off. I hope this arrangement will be carried out with as little pain to either as possible. I shall not send you back your letters. I am sure getting back letters is always painful, and ought to be avoided. I shall burn yours, and I ask you to do the same with any notes you may have of mine. Neither will I return the few things that cannot be burned. None of them is, I think, of any intrinsic value to you beyond the value it had between you and me. I shall keep them for a week and then destroy them.
"Believe me, Mr. Hanbury, I take this step with a view to our mutual good, and in no haste or pique. I shall always think of you, with the greatest interest and respect. I should like, if you think well of it, that we may remain friends in appearance as I hope we may always be in spirit.
"I ask you for only one favour. Pray do not make any attempt whatever to treat this decision as anything but final and irrevocable.
"Yours very sincerely,
"Dora Ashton."
She determined not to post this letter until late that night. To-morrow she was dining out. She should leave home early and not come back until she had to go straight to her room to dress. After dinner, they were going to the theatre, so she should avoid all chance of meeting him if he disregarded her request and called.
So far the difficult parts of the affair had been done, and done too with much less pain than she could have imagined. She had taken the two great steps without faltering. She had made up her mind to end the engagement between her and John Hanbury, and she had written to him saying the engagement was at an end. If ill-matched people who found themselves engaged to one another only acted with her decision and promptness what an infinity of misery would be avoided. She was almost surprised it had required so little effort for her to make up her mind and to put her decision on paper. She had often heard of the miseries such a step entailed, and here she was now sitting alone in her own room after doing the very thing and feeling little the worse of it. She was but twenty-one, and she had broken with the only man she had ever seriously thought of as a lover, and it had not caused her anything like the pang she had suffered last night when he reproached her so bitterly and told her he could expect nothing but betrayal at her hands.
And now that the important part of the affair had been disposed of in a business-like way, what had she to do?
Nothing.