“My Dear Mrs. Ashton,

  “I cannot address you in any more formal words, although you will have
  reason to fling down the letter at my presuming to use these now—­for
  dear, most dear, you will ever be to me.

  “What can I say?  Why do I write to you?  Indeed to the latter question I
  can only answer I do not know, save that some instinct of good feeling,
  not utterly dead within me, is urging me to it.

  “Will you let me for a moment throw conventionality aside; will you for
  that brief space of time let me speak truly and freely to you, as one
  might speak who has passed the confines of this world?

“When a man behaves to a woman as I, to my eternal shame, have this day behaved to Anne, it is, I think, a common custom to regard the false man as having achieved a sort of triumph; to attribute somewhat of humiliation to the other.

“Dear Mrs. Ashton, I cannot sleep until I have said to you that in my case the very contrary is the fact.  A more abject, humiliated man than I stand at this hour in my own eyes never yet took his sins upon his soul.  Even you might be appeased if you could look into mine and see its sense of degradation.

  “That my punishment has already come home to me is only just; that I
  shall have to conceal it from all the world, including my wife, will
  not lessen its sting.

“I have this evening married Maude Kirton.  I might tell you of unfair play brought to bear upon me, of a positive assurance, apparently well grounded, that Anne had entered into an engagement to wed another, could I admit that these facts were any excuse for me.  They are no excuse; not the slightest palliation.  My own yielding folly alone is to blame, and I shall take shame to myself for ever.

“I write this to you as I might have written it to my own mother, were she living; not as an expiation; only to tell of my pain; that I am not utterly hardened; that I would sue on my knees for pardon, were it not shut out from me by my own act.  There is no pardon for such as I. When you have torn it in pieces, you will, I trust, forget the writer.

  “God bless you, dear Mrs. Ashton!  God bless and comfort another who is
  dear to you!—­and believe me with true undying remorse your once
  attached friend,

  “Hartledon.”

It was a curious letter to write; but men of Lord Hartledon’s sensitive temperament in regard to others’ feelings often do strange things; things the world at large would stare at in their inability to understand them.  The remorse might not have come home to him quite so soon as this, his wedding-day, but for the inopportune appearance of Dr. Ashton in the chapel, speaking those words that told home so forcibly.  Such reproach on these vacillating men inflicts a torture that burns into the heart like living fire.