He had promised to be at the Bawn that evening, and now accordingly sought the shore, where the Arrow lay, and was soon within the shelter of his own house.  The arrangement of toilet was a brief matter; and that concluded, Mr. Raleigh entered his library, an apartment now slightly in disarray, and therefore, perhaps, not uncongenial with his present mood.  After strolling round the place, Mr. Raleigh paused at the window an instant, the window overhung with clematis, and commanding the long stretch of water between him and the Bawn, which last was, however, too distant for any movement to be discerned there.  Soon Mr. Raleigh turned his back upon the scene that lay pictured in such beauty below, and, throwing himself into a deep armchair, remained motionless and plunged in thought for many moments.  Rising at last, he took from the table a package of letters from India that had arrived in his absence.  Glancing absently at the superscriptions, breaking the seal of one, he replaced them:  it would take too long to read them now; they must wait.  Then Mr. Raleigh had recourse to a universal panacea, and walked to and fro across the room, with measured, unvarying steps, till the striking clock warned him that time was passing.  Mr. Raleigh drew near his desk again, took up the pen, and hesitated; then recalling his gaze that had seemed to search his own inmost soul, he drew the paper nearer and wrote.

What he wrote, the very words, may not signify; with the theme one is sufficiently acquainted.  Perhaps he poured out there all that had so often trembled on his lips without finding utterance; perhaps, if ever passionate heart flashed its own fire into its implements, this pen and paper quivered beneath the current throbbing through them.  The page was brief, but therein all was said.  Sealing it hastily, he summoned Capua.

“Capua,” said he, giving him the note, “you are to go with me across the lake now.  We shall return somewhere between eleven and twelve.  Just as we leave, you are to give this note to Mrs. Laudersdale.  Do you understand?”

“Yah, Massa, let dis chile alone,” responded Capua, grinning at the prospect of society, and speedily following his master.

The breeze had fallen, so that they rowed the whole distance, with the idle sail hanging loosely, and arrived only just as the red sunset painted the lake behind them with blushing shadows.  Mr. Raleigh joined Helen Heath and his cousin in the hall; Capua, superb with the importance of his commission, sought another entrance.  But just as the latter individual had crossed the threshold, he encountered the nurse whom his master had previously met in the wood.  Nothing could have been more acceptable in his eyes than this addition to the circle below-stairs.  Capua’s hat was in his hand at once, and bows and curtsies and articulations and gesticulations followed with such confusing rapidity, that, when the mutually pleased pair turned in company toward the kitchens, a scrap of white paper, that had fluttered down in the disorder, was suffered to remain unnoticed on the floor.  The courier had lost his despatch.  Coming in from her walk, not five minutes later, Mrs. Laudersdale’s eye was caught thereby; stooping to take it, she read with surprise her own name thereon, and ascended the stairs possessed thereof.