love you.  Should you obtain this great victory over yourself, you will see me again.  Meantime, think of her who loves you to distraction, and whose soul hovers about you unseen.  Pray for me, dear one, at midnight, and at eight o’clock every morning; for those are two of the hours I shall pray for you.  Do you remember the old church, and how you cried over me?  I can write no more:  my tears blind me so.  Farewell.  Your unhappy

“Grace.”

Little read this piteous letter, and it was a heavy blow to him; a blow that all the tenderness shown in it could not at first soften.  She had fled from him; she shunned him.  It was not from Coventry she fled; it was from him.

He went home cold and sick at heart, and gave himself up to grief and deep regrets for several days.

But soon his powerful and elastic mind, impatient of impotent sorrow, and burning for some kind of action, seized upon vengeance as the only thing left to do.

At this period he looked on Coventry as a beast in human shape, whom he had a moral right to extinguish; only, as he had not a legal right, it must be done with consummate art.  He trusted nobody; spoke to nobody; but set himself quietly to find out where Coventry lived, and what were his habits.  He did this with little difficulty.  Coventry lodged in a principal street, but always dined at a club, and returned home late, walking through a retired street or two; one of these passed by the mouth of a narrow court that was little used.

Little, disguised as a workman, made a complete reconnaissance of this locality, and soon saw that his enemy was at his mercy.

But, while he debated within himself what measure of vengeance he should take, and what noiseless weapon he should use, an unseen antagonist baffled him.  That antagonist was Grace Carden.  Still foreboding mischief, she wrote to Mr. Coventry, from a town two hundred miles distant: 

“Whatever you are now, you were born a gentleman, and will, I think, respect a request from a lady you have wronged.  Mr. Little has returned, and I have left Hillsborough; if he encounters you in his despair, he will do you some mortal injury.  This will only make matters worse, and I dread the scandal that will follow, and to hear my sad story in a court of law as a justification for his violence.  Oblige me, then, by leaving Hillsborough for a time, as I have done.”

On receipt of this, Coventry packed up his portmanteau directly, and, leaving Lally behind to watch the town, and see whether this was a ruse, he went directly to the town whence Grace’s letter was dated, and to the very hotel.

This she had foreseen and intended.

He found she had been there, and had left for a neighboring watering-place:  he followed her thither, and there she withdrew the clew; she left word she was gone to Stirling; but doubled on him, and soon put hundreds of miles between them.  He remained in Scotland, hunting her.