’No gentleman should become intimately acquainted with a woman who could write such a letter as that,’ said Lily.  And as she spoke she remembered a certain episode in John Eames’s early life, which had reached her from a source which she had not doubted, and which had given her pain and offended her.  She had believed that John Eames had in that case behaved very cruelly to a young woman, and had thought that her offence had come simply from that feeling.  ‘But of course it is nothing to me,’ she said.  ’Mr Eames can choose his friends as he likes.  I only wish that my name might not be mentioned to them.’

‘It is not from him that she has heard it.’

’Perhaps not.  As I said before, of course, it does not signify; only there is something very disagreeable about the whole thing.  The idea is so hateful!  Of course this woman means me to understand that she considers herself to have a claim upon Mr Eames, and that I stand in her way.’

‘And why should you not stand in her way?’

’I will stand in nobody’s way.  Mr Eames has a right to give his hand to anyone that he pleases.  I, at any rate, can have no cause of offence against him.  The only thing is that I do wish that my name could be left alone.’  Lily, when she was in her own room again, did destroy the letter; but before she did so she read it again, and it became so indelibly impressed on her memory that she could not forget even the words of it.  The lady who wrote had pledged herself, under certain conditions, ‘not to interfere with Miss L D.’  ‘Interfere with me!’ Lily said to herself; ‘nobody has power to do so.’  As she turned it over in her mind, her heart became hard against John Eames.  No woman would have troubled herself to write such a letter without some cause for the writing.  That the writer was vulgar, false, unfeminine, Lily thought that she could perceive from the letter itself; but no doubt the woman knew John Eames had some interest in the question of his marriage, and was entitled to some answer to her question—­only was not entitled to such answer from Lily Dale.

For some weeks past now, up to the hour at which the anonymous letter had reached her hands, Lily’s heart had been growing soft and still softer towards John Eames; and now again it had become hardened.  I think that the appearance of Adolphus Crosbie in the Park, that momentary vision of the real man by which the divinity of the imaginary Apollo had been dashed to the ground, had done a service to the cause of her other lover; of the lover who had never been a god, but who of late years had at any rate grown into the full dimension of a man.  Unfortunately for the latter, he had commenced his love-making when he was but little more than a boy.  Lily, as she had thought of the two together, in the days of her solitude, after she had been deserted by Crosbie, had ever pictured to herself the lover whom she had preferred as having something godlike in his favour, as being