Mr. Ely's jaw dropped, and he stared at the letter as though it were a ghost.
"Well--I'm--hanged!' The fact is, I am going to marry Mr. Summers instead.' That takes the cake!' Yours truly, Lily Truscott.'--If that isn't the sweetest thing in love-letters ever yet I heard of!"
Quite a curious change had come over Mr. Ely. If we may be forgiven a vulgarism which is most expressive--he seemed to have been knocked all of a heap. His head had fallen forward on his chest, one limp hand held Miss Truscott's letter, the other dangled nerveless by his side.
"And I gave twenty pounds for an engagement-ring!"
They were the first words in which he gave expression to the strength of his emotion.
"Good Lord, if I had given him what he asked, and stumped up forty-five!"
The reflection sent a shudder all through his frame. The horror of the picture thus conjured up by his imagination had the effect of a tonic on his nerves, it recalled him to himself.
"I'll have another read at this. There isn't much of it, but what there is requires a good deal of digesting."
He pulled himself together, sat up in his chair, and had another read.
"'Dear Mr. Ely' (yes, by George, dear at any price, I'll swear! Like her impudence to call me 'dear'! I wonder she didn't begin it 'Sir'), 'just a line with reference to what passed between us yesterday.' (That is, I think, about the coollest bit I ever heard of. Quite a casual allusion, don't you know, to a matter of not the slightest importance to any one, especially me. That young woman's graduated in an establishment where they teach 'em how to go.) 'I have changed my mind!' (That's--that's about two stone better than the other. She's changed her mind! Holy Moses! About something, you know, about which we change our minds as easily and as often as we do our boots.) 'I thought it better to let you know at the earliest possible moment.' (She certainly has done that. Unless she had changed her mind before she had made it up, she could scarcely have let me know it sooner. She might have wired, to be sure! But perhaps she never thought of that.) 'It is quite impossible for me to be your wife.' (It is as well that the explanation follows immediately after, or echo would have answered 'Why?') 'The fact is, I am going to marry Mr. Summers instead.' I suppose there never was a larger amount of meaning contained in a smaller number of words. Among the remarkable women the world has seen the record's hers; she is certainly unique."