"What will be the use of that?"
"Never mind; you promise."
"Oh, I'll promise; but I shall leave the house this morning all the same."
"You can, and my prayers will go with you; but you're not going in your present frame of mind towards me--that I tell you straight. You've had no breakfast, and it's lunch time. When you're dressed, suppose you come to my room and have something with me; I'll see that we're alone."
"If you like, I'll come, but it will be on the understanding that you will not even try to persuade me not to do what I am going to do."
"I won't try to persuade or dissuade you--only you come."
When the countess was again in the pretty sitting-room which she called her very own she took a sheet of paper from between the buttons of her blouse: it was the sheet of paper which had been contained in the envelope which had been presented to the earl by the bronze figure on the pedestal. The little lady read it carefully through; then she struck a match, and lit it at the corner, holding it in her fingers while it flamed, and she asked herself:
"I wonder who wrote it--could it have been Jane Simmons?"
When the paper had been utterly consumed, dropping the ash on to the floor, she pressed it into the carpet with her shoe, so that none of it remained. Then she rang the bell. To the man who answered it she said:
"There's a maid in the house named Simmons--Jane Simmons. Tell them to send her to me here at once."