Perhaps just because she had not broken down before, she felt the more now all that had happened in the way of the strange, the sinister, and the untoward during the last fortnight.  And all at once, after reading yet again right through the quiet, measured letter of her old friend and constant lover, Blanche Farrow suddenly burst into a passion of tears.

And then it struck her as funny, as even absurd, that she should cry like this!  She hadn’t cried for years and years—­in fact, she could hardly remember the day when she had last cried.

She jumped out of bed and put on her dressing-gown, for it was very cold, and then she went and gazed at her reflection in the one looking-glass in the room.  It was a beautiful old Jacobean mirror fixed over the dressing-table.

Heavens!  What a fright she looked!  Do tears always have that disfiguring effect on a woman?  This must be a lesson to her.  She dabbed her eyes with a wet handkerchief, and then she went over to the writing-table and sat down.

For the first time in her life Blanche Farrow wrote Mark Gifford a really grateful, sincere letter.  She said, truly, how touched she was by his long devotion and by all his goodness to her.  She admitted, humbly, that she wished she were worthy of it all.  But she finally added that she feared she could never find it in her heart and conscience to say that she would do what he wished.  She had become too old, too set in her ways....

Yet it was with a heavy heart that she wrote her long letter in answer to his, and it took her a long time, for she often waited a few moments in between the sentences.

How strange was her relationship to this man of whom she saw so little, and yet with whom she felt on close, intangible terms of intimacy!  His work tied him to London, and of late years she had not been much in London.  He knew very little of her movements.  Why, this very letter had been sent to her, care of her London club, the club which had its uses—­principally—­when she wanted to entertain Mark Gifford himself to lunch or dinner.

His letter had wandered to yet another address—­an address she had left at the club weeks ago, the only address they had.  From thence it had reached the last house where she had been staying before she had come to Wyndfell Hall.  The wonderful thing was that the letter had reached her at all.  But she was very glad it had come, if only at long last.

After her letter was finished, she suddenly felt that she must put in a word to account for the delay in her answer to what should have received an immediate reply.  And so she added a postscript, which, unlike most women’s postscripts, was of really very little importance—­or so the writer thought.

This unimportant postscript ran: