Three ways of conduct were open to her, she saw plainly enough.  Wisdom suggested that she should not only put the letter aside, but that she should banish the recollection of its existence from her life.  But, while she admitted that this would be the most courageous treatment of the situation, she recognised perfectly that to act upon such a decision was utterly beyond her strength.  Though she were to destroy the object, was the memory of it not seared indelibly into her brain? and would not this memory return to embitter long afterward her happiest moments?  “When he kisses me I shall remember that he has kissed other women and I feel that I shall grow to hate him if he should ever write to me again in those lying words.”  But she knew intuitively that he would use the same ending in his next letter, and that she would still be powerless to hate him, if only because of his disturbing look, which came back to her whenever she attempted to judge him harshly.  “I might really hate him so long as he was absent from me, and yet if he came again and looked at me in that way for a single instant, I know that, in spite of my resolution, I would throw myself into his arms.”  And she felt that she despised herself for a bondage against which she struggled as hopelessly as a bird caught in a fowler’s net.

Of the two ways which remained to her, she chose, in the end, the course which appeared to her to be the least ungenerous.  She would not read the letter—­the opening and the closing sentences she had seen by accident—­for, when all was said, it had not been written for her eyes; and it struck her, as she brooded over it, that there would be positive disloyalty in thus stealing in upon the secrets of Kemper’s past.  No, she would place it in his hands, she determined finally, still unread; and in so doing she would not only defeat the purpose of the sender, but would prove to him as well as to herself that her faith in him was as unalterable as her love.  After all to trust was easier than to distrust, for the brief agony of her indecision had brought to her the knowledge that the way of suspicion is the way of death.

And so when he came a little later she gave the letter, at which she had not again looked, into his hands.  “Here is something that reached me only this morning,” she said.  “It is not worth thinking of, and I have read only the first and the last sentence.”

At her words he unfolded the paper, throwing a mere casual glance, as he did so, upon the thin foreign envelope, which appeared to convey to him no hint of its significant contents.

Then, after a hurried skimming of the first page, he turned back again and carefully studied the address in a mystification which was pierced presently by a flash of light.

“By Jove, so she’s heard it!” he exclaimed; and the instant afterward he added in a kind of grudging admiration, “Well, she’s a devil!”

The incident appeared suddenly to engross him in a manner that Laura had not expected, and he stooped to examine the postmark with an attention which gave her, while she watched him, a queer sense of being left out quite in the cold.