“Why do you cough like that, Jack?” he demanded after a paroxysm had shaken the other into an armchair, where he lay sweating and panting: 

“It’s a cold,” Dysart managed to say; “been hanging on for a month.”

“Three months,” said Grandcourt tersely.  “Why don’t you take care of it?”

There was a silence; nothing more was said about the cold; and presently Grandcourt drew a letter from his pocket and handed it silently to Dysart.  It was in Rosalie’s handwriting, dated two months before, and directed to Dysart at Baltimore.  The post-office authorities had marked it, “No address,” and had returned it a few days since to the sender.

These details Dysart noticed on the envelope and the heading of the first page; he glanced over a line or two, lowered the letter, and looked questioningly over it at Grandcourt: 

“What’s it about?—­if you know,” he asked wearily.  “I’m not inclined just now to read anything that may be unpleasant.”

Grandcourt said quietly: 

“I have not read the letter, but your wife has told me something of what it contains.  She wrote and mailed it to you weeks ago—­before the crash—­saying, I believe, that adversity was not the time for the settlement of domestic differences, and that if her private fortune could avert disaster, you were to write immediately to her attorneys.”

Dysart gazed at him as though stunned; then his dull gaze fell once more on the envelope.  He examined it, went all over it with lack-lustre eyes, laid it aside, and finally began to read his wife’s letter—­the letter that had never reached him because he had used another name on the hotel register in Baltimore.

Grandcourt watched him with painful interest as he sat, hunched up, coughing at intervals, and poring over his wife’s long, angular chirography.  There was much between the lines to read, but Dysart could never read it; much to understand, but he could never understand it.

    “Delancy tells me,” she wrote, “that you are threatened with very
    serious difficulties.  Once or twice you yourself have said as much
    to me; and my answer was that they no longer concerned me.

“The situation is this:  I have, as you know, consulted counsel with a view to begin proceedings for a separation.  This has been discontinued—­temporarily, at any rate—­because I have been led to believe by your friend, Delancy Grandcourt, that the present is no time to add to your perplexities.

“He has, I may add, induced me to believe other things which my better sense rejects; but no woman’s logic—­which is always half sentiment—­could remain unshaken by the simple loyalty to you and to me of this friend of yours and of mine.  And this letter would never have been written except, practically, at his dictation.  Kindly refrain from showing it to him as my acknowledgment here of his influence in the matter would grieve him very deeply.