There was no show of agitation.  His eye was calm; only his mouth showed any feeling or made any comment.  It was a little supercilious and scornful.  Sitting down by the table, he spread the letter out, and read it with great deliberation.  It was the first time he had looked at it since he received it in Vienna and had placed it in the dispatch-box.

“Dear Ian,” it ran, “our year of probation—­that is the word isn’t it?—­is up; and I have decided that our ways must lie apart.  I am going to marry Rudyard Byng next month.  He is very kind and very strong, and not too ragingly clever.  You know I should chafe at being reminded daily of my own stupidity by a very clever man.  You and I have had so many good hours together, there has been such confidence between us, that no other friendship can ever be the same; and I shall always want to go to you, and ask your advice, and learn to be wise.  You will not turn a cold shoulder on me, will you?  I think you yourself realized that my wish to wait a year before giving a final answer was proof that I really had not that in my heart which would justify me in saying what you wished me to say.  Oh yes, you knew; and the last day when you bade me good-bye you almost said as much!  I was so young, so unschooled, when you first asked me, and I did not know my own mind; but I know it now, and so I go to Rudyard Byng for better or for worse—­”

He suddently stopped reading, sat back in his char, and laughed sardonically.

“For richer, for poorer’—­now to have launched out on the first phrase, and to have jibbed at the second was distinctly stupid.  The quotation could only have been carried off with audacity of the ripest kind.  ’For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death us do part, amen—­’ That was the way to have done it, if it was to be done at all.  Her cleverness forsook her when she wrote that letter.  ’Our year of probation’—­she called it that.  Dear, dear, what a poor prevaricator the best prevaricator is!  She was sworn to me, bound to me, wanted a year in which to have her fling before she settled down, and she threw me over—­like that.”

He did not read the rest of the letter, but got up, went over to the fire, threw it in, and watched it burn.

“I ought to have done so when I received it,” he said, almost kindly now.  “A thing like that ought never to be kept a minute.  It’s a terrible confession, damning evidence, a self-made exposure, and to keep it is too brutal, too hard on the woman.  If anything had happened to me and it had been read, ’Not all the King’s horses nor all the King’s men could put Humpty Dumpty together again.’”