Margaret hears, especially from Mary Lyster, who is staying in this hotel with her father, and seems to have a good many friends here.

“Dearest William—­I have been lingering on these things because it is so hard to have to tell you what passed between me and Kitty.  Oh! my dear, dear son, take courage.  Even now everything is not lost.  Her conscience may awaken at the last moment; this bad man may abandon his pursuit of her; I may still succeed in bringing her back to you.  But I am in terrible fear—­and I must tell you the whole truth.

“Kitty received me alone.  The room was very dark—­only one lamp that gave a bad light—­so that I saw her very indistinctly.  She was in black, and, as far as I could see, extremely pale and weary.  And what struck me painfully was her haggard, careless look.  All the little details of her dress and hair seemed so neglected.  Blanche says she is far too irritable and impatient in the mornings to let her hair be done as usual.  She just rolls it into one big knot herself and puts a comb in it.  She wears the simplest clothes, and changes as little as possible.  She says she is soon going to have done with all that kind of thing, and she must get used to it.  My own impression is that she is going through great agony of mind—­above all, that she is ill—­ill in body and soul.

“She told me quite calmly, however, that she had made up her mind to leave you; she said that she had written to you to tell you so.  I asked her if it was because she had ceased to love you.  After a pause she said ‘No.’  Was it because some one else had come between you?  She threw up her head proudly, and said it was best to be quite plain and frank.  She had met Geoffrey Cliffe again, and she meant henceforward to share his life.  Then she went into the wildest dreams about going back with him to the Balkans, and nursing in a hospital, and dying—­she hopes!—­of hard work and privations.  And all this in a torrent of words—­and her eyes blazing, with that look in them as though she saw nothing but the scenes of her own imagination.  She talked of devotion—­and of forgetting herself in other people.  I could only tell her, of course, that all this sounded to me the most grotesque sophistry and perversion.  She was forgetting her first duty, breaking her marriage vow, and tearing your life asunder.  She shook her head, and said you would soon forget her.  ’If he had loved me he would never have left me!’ she said, again and again, with a passion I shall never forget.

“Of course that made me very angry, and I described what the situation had been when you reached London—­Lord Parham’s state of mind—­and the consternation caused everywhere by the wretched book.  I tried to make her understand what there was at stake—­the hopes of all who follow you in the House and the country—­the great reforms of which you are the life and soul—­your personal