do, indeed; and I am not scolding you a bit.  As long as I can have two or three dear, sweet, loving words, I shall be as happy as a queen.  Ah, if you knew it all!  But you never can know it all.  A man has so many other things to learn that he cannot understand it.

   Good-bye, dear, dear, dearest man.  Whatever you do I shall
   be quite sure you have done the best.

   Ever your own, with all the love of her heart,

   MARY F. JONES.

This was very nice.  Such a man as was Phineas Finn always takes a delight which he cannot express even to himself in the receipt of such a letter as this.  There is nothing so flattering as the warm expression of the confidence of a woman’s love, and Phineas thought that no woman ever expressed this more completely than did his Mary.  Dear, dearest Mary.  As for giving her up, as for treachery to one so trusting, so sweet, so well beloved, that was out of the question.  But nevertheless the truth came home to him more clearly day by day, that he of all men was the last who ought to have given himself up to such a passion.  For her sake he ought to have abstained.  So he told himself now.  For her sake he ought to have kept aloof from her;—­and for his own sake he ought to have kept aloof from Mr. Monk.  That very day, with Mary’s letter in his pocket, he went to the livery stables and explained that he would not keep his horse any longer.  There was no difficulty about the horse.  Mr. Howard Macleod of the Treasury would take him from that very hour.  Phineas, as he walked away, uttered a curse upon Mr. Howard Macleod.  Mr. Howard Macleod was just beginning the glory of his life in London, and he, Phineas Finn, was bringing his to an end.

With Mary’s letter in his pocket he went up to Portman Square.  He had again got into the habit of seeing Lady Laura frequently, and was often with her brother, who now again lived at his father’s house.  A letter had reached Lord Brentford, through his lawyer, in which a demand was made by Mr. Kennedy for the return of his wife.  She was quite determined that she would never go back to him; and there had come to her a doubt whether it would not be expedient that she should live abroad so as to be out of the way of persecution from her husband.  Lord Brentford was in great wrath, and Lord Chiltern had once or twice hinted that perhaps he had better “see” Mr. Kennedy.  The amenities of such an interview, as this would be, had up to the present day been postponed; and, in a certain way, Phineas had been used as a messenger between Mr. Kennedy and his wife’s family.

“I think it will end,” she said, “in my going to Dresden, and settling myself there.  Papa will come to me when Parliament is not sitting.”

“It will be very dull.”

“Dull!  What does dulness amount to when one has come to such a pass as this?  When one is in the ruck of fortune, to be dull is very bad; but when misfortune comes, simple dulness is nothing.  It sounds almost like relief.”