Lady Ongar presents her compliments to Count Pateroff, and begs to return the enclosed manuscript, which is, to her, perfectly valueless.  Lady Ongar must still decline, and now more strongly than before, to receive Count Pateroff.

    Bolton street, May, 186—­

She was quite firm as she did this.  She had no doubt at all on the matter.  She did not feel that she wanted to ask for any advice.  But she did feel that this count might still work her additional woe, that her cup of sorrow might not even yet be full, and that she was sadly—­sadly in want of love and protection.  For aught she knew, the count might publish the whole statement, and people might believe that those words came from her husband, and that her husband had understood what would be best for her fame and for his honor.  The whole thing was a threat, and not to save herself from any misery, would she have succumbed to a menace; but still it was possible that the threat might be carried out.

She was sorely in want of love and protection.  At this time, when the count’s letter reached her, Harry had been with her; and we know what had passed between them.  She had bid him go to Florence, and love Florence, and marry Florence, and leave her in her desolation.  That had been her last command to him.  But we all know what such commands mean.  She had not been false in giving him these orders.  She had intended it at the moment.  The glow of self-sacrifice had been warm in her bosom, and she had resolved to do without that which she wanted, in order that another might have it.  But when she thought of it afterward in her loneliness, she told herself that Florence Burton could not want Harry’s love as she wanted it.  There could not be such need to this girl, who possessed father and mother, and brothers, and youth, as there was to her, who had no other arm on which she could lean, beside that of the one man for whom she had acknowledged her love, and who had also declared his passion for her.  She made no scheme to deprive Florence of her lover.  In the long hours of her own solitude she never revoked, even within her own bosom, the last words she had said to Harry Clavering.  But not the less did she hope that he might come to her again, and that she might learn from him that he had freed himself from that unfortunate engagement into which her falseness to him had driven him.

It was after she had answered Count Pateroff’s letter that she resolved to go out of town for three or four days.  For some short time she had been minded to go away altogether, and not to return till after the Autumn; but this scheme gradually diminished itself and fell away, till she determined that she would come back after three or four days.  Then came to her Sophie—­her devoted Sophie—­Sophie whom she despised and hated; Sophie of whom she was so anxious to rid herself that in all her plans there was some little under-plot to that effect; Sophie whom