“Yes.  If I miss my next opportunity—­if you are as cruel as ever, and if I feel it again as I have felt it already—­good-bye to the world which has grudged me the happiness that it gives to others.  Good-bye to life, which nothing but a little kindness from you can ever make pleasurable to me again.  Don’t blame yourself, sir, if it ends in this way.  But try—­do try—­to feel some forgiving sorrow for me!  I shall take care that you find out what I have done for you, when I am past telling you of it myself.  Will you say something kind of me then—­in the same gentle way that you have when you speak to Miss Rachel?  If you do that, and if there are such things as ghosts, I believe my ghost will hear it, and tremble with the pleasure of it.

“It’s time I left off.  I am making myself cry.  How am I to see my way to the hiding-place if I let these useless tears come and blind me?

“Besides, why should I look at the gloomy side?  Why not believe, while I can, that it will end well after all?  I may find you in a good humour to-night—­or, if not, I may succeed better to-morrow morning.  I sha’n’t improve my plain face by fretting—­shall I?  Who knows but I may have filled all these weary long pages of paper for nothing?  They will go, for safety’s sake (never mind now for what other reason) into the hiding-place along with the nightgown.  It has been hard, hard work writing my letter.  Oh! if we only end in understanding each other, how I shall enjoy tearing it up!

“I beg to remain, sir, your true lover and humble servant,

“Rosanna Spearman.”

The reading of the letter was completed by Betteredge in silence.  After carefully putting it back in the envelope, he sat thinking, with his head bowed down, and his eyes on the ground.

“Betteredge,” I said, “is there any hint to guide me at the end of the letter?”

He looked up slowly, with a heavy sigh.

“There is nothing to guide you, Mr. Franklin,” he answered.  “If you take my advice you will keep the letter in the cover till these present anxieties of yours have come to an end.  It will sorely distress you, whenever you read it.  Don’t read it now.”

I put the letter away in my pocket-book.

A glance back at the sixteenth and seventeenth chapters of Betteredge’s Narrative will show that there really was a reason for my thus sparing myself, at a time when my fortitude had been already cruelly tried.  Twice over, the unhappy woman had made her last attempt to speak to me.  And twice over, it had been my misfortune (God knows how innocently!) to repel the advances she had made to me.  On the Friday night, as Betteredge truly describes it, she had found me alone at the billiard-table.  Her manner and language suggested to me and would have suggested to any man, under the circumstances—­that she was about to confess a guilty knowledge of the disappearance of the Diamond.  For her own sake, I had purposely