The fire needed stirring.  As he broke the black surface of coal, a flame shot up, red, lambent, a serpent’s tongue.  It had a voice; it tempted.  He took the packet of letters from the table.

He had not yet read them through; had only tested them here and there under his brother’s eye.  Yes, they were the letters of a woman, who, suffering (as he knew) the strongest temptation to which her nature could be exposed, subdued herself in obedience to what she held the law of duty.  He read page after page.  Again and again she all but said, “I love you”; again and again she told her tempter that his suit was useless, that she would rather die than yield.  Daniel Otway had used every argument to persuade her to defy the world and follow him—­easy to understand his motives.  One saw that, if she had been alone, she would have done so; but there was her daughter, there was her brother; to them she sacrificed what seemed to her the one chance of happiness left in a wasted life.

Piers interrupted his reading to hear once more the voice that counselled baseness.  Whom would it injure, if he destroyed these papers?  Certainly not Irene, his first thought, who, he held it proved, was well rescued from a mistaken marriage.  Not Dr. Derwent, or Olga, who, he persuaded himself, had already no doubt whatever of Mrs. Hannaford’s innocence.  Not the poor dead woman herself——­

What was this passage on which his eye had fallen?  “I have long had a hope that your brother Piers might marry Olga.  It would make me very happy; I cannot imagine for her a better husband.  It came first into my mind years ago, at Geneva, and I have never lost the wish.  Ah! how grateful you would make me, if, forgetting ourselves, you would join me in somehow trying to bring about this happiness for those two!  Piers is coming to live in London.  Do see as much of him as you can.  I think very, very highly of him, and he is almost as dear to me as a son of my own.  Speak to him of Olga.  Sometimes a suggestion—­and you know that I desire only his good.”

The voice spoke to him from the grave; it had a sweeter tone than that other.  He read on; he came to the last sheet—­so sad, so hopeless, that it brought tears to his eyes.

“Cannot you defend me?  Cannot you prove the falsehood of that story?  Cannot you save me from this bitter disgrace?  Oh, who will show the truth and do me justice?”

Could he burn that letter?  Could he close his ears against that cry of one driven to death by wrong?

He drew a deep sigh, and looked about him as if waking from a bad dream.  Why, he had come near to whole brotherhood with a man as coldly cruel and infamous as any that walked the earth!  Destroying these letters, he would have been worse than Daniel.

Straightway he wrote to Olga, requesting the appointment with her.  Upon Olga once more he fixed his mind.  He resolved that he would not part from her without asking her to be his wife.  If he had but done so before hearing that news from John Jacks!  Then it seemed to him that Olga was his happiness.