going out of the room; but her mother had caught her before the door was opened.
"Lily," she said, "if you think you can be happy with him, he shall come."
"No, mamma, no. I have been looking for the light ever since I read his letter, and I think I see it. And now, mamma, I will make a clean breast of it. From the moment in which I heard that that poor woman was dead, I have been in a state of flutter. It has been weak of me, and silly, and contemptible. But I could not help it. I kept on asking myself whether he would ever think of me now. Well; he has answered the question; and has so done it that he has forced upon me the necessity of a resolution. I have resolved, and I believe that I shall be the better for it."
The letter which Mrs. Dale wrote to Mr. Crosbie, was as follows:—
"Mrs. Dale presents her compliments to Mr. Crosbie, and begs to assure him that it will not now be possible that he should renew the relations which were broken off three years ago, between him and Mrs. Dale's family." It was very short, certainly, and it did not by any means satisfy Mrs. Dale. But she did not know how to say more without saying too much. The object of her letter was to save him the trouble of a futile perseverance, and them from the annoyance of persecution; and this she wished to do without mentioning her daughter's name. And she was determined that no word should escape her in which there was any touch of severity, any hint of an accusation. So much she owed to Lily in return for all that Lily was prepared to abandon. "There is my note," she said at last, offering it to her daughter. "I did not mean to see it," said Lily, "and, mamma, I will not read it now. Let it go. I know you have been good and have not scolded him." "I have not scolded him, certainly," said Mrs. Dale. And then the letter was sent.
Mr. John Eames, of the Income-tax Office, had in these days risen so high in the world that people in the west-end of town, and very respectable people too,—people living in South Kensington, in neighbourhoods not far from Belgravia, and in very handsome houses round Bayswater,—were glad to ask him out to dinner. Money had been left to him by an earl, and rumour had of course magnified that
