It was a countryman’s letter, ill-spelt, involved, and of a character to give Algernon a fine scholarly sense of superiority altogether novel.  Everybody abused Algernon for his abuse of common Queen’s English in his epistles:  but here was a letter in comparison with which his own were doctorial, and accordingly he fell upon it with an acrimonious rapture of pedantry known to dull wits that have by extraordinary hazard pounced on a duller.

“You’re ‘willing to forgeit and forgeive,’ are you, you dog!” he exclaimed, half dancing.  “You’d forge anything, you rascal, if you could disguise your hand—­that, I don’t doubt.  You ’expeck the thousand pound to be paid down the day of my marriage,’ do you, you impudent ruffian! ‘acording to agremint.’  What a mercenary vagabond this is!”

Algernon reflected a minute.  The money was to pass through his hands.  He compressed a desire to dispute with Sedgett that latter point about the agreement, and opened Edward’s letter.

It contained an order on a firm of attorneys to sell out so much Bank Stock and pay over one thousand pounds to Mr. A. Blancove.

The beautiful concision of style in this document gave Algernon a feeling of profound deference toward the law and its officers.

“Now, that’s the way to Write!” he said.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Accompanying this pleasant, pregnant bit of paper, possessed of such admirable literary excellence, were the following flimsy lines from Edward’s self, to Algernon incomprehensible.

As there is a man to be seen behind these lines in the dull unconscious process of transformation from something very like a villain to something by a few degrees more estimable, we may as well look at the letter in full.

It begins with a neat display of consideration for the person addressed, common to letters that are dictated by overpowering egoism:—­

“Dear Algy,—­I hope you are working and attending regularly to office business.  Look to that and to your health at present.  Depend upon it, there is nothing like work.  Fix your teeth in it.  Work is medicine.  A truism!  Truisms, whether they lie in the depths of thought, or on the surface, are at any rate the pearls of experience.

“I am coming home.  Let me know the instant this affair is over.  I can’t tell why I wait here.  I fall into lethargies.  I write to no one but to you.  Your supposition that I am one of the hangers-on of the coquette of her time, and that it is for her I am seeking to get free, is conceived with your usual discrimination.  For Margaret Lovell?  Do you imagine that I desire to be all my life kicking the beam, weighed in capricious scales, appraised to the direct nicety, petulantly taken up, probed for my weakest point, and then flung into the grate like a child’s toy?  That’s the fate of the several asses who put on the long-eared Lovell-livery.