The livid dints were deep and restless in Winston’s nostrils, as seen by the light of the tiny taper he raised to extinguish, when his prize was secured.  The devil supplied him with another crafty hint, as he was in the act of folding one edge of Frederic’s letter that it might fit into the new cover.  Why not strip off the letter entirely, that it might seem to have been opened, read, and then flung back upon the writer’s hands with contumely?  Half-way measures were unsafe and foolish.  Stratagem, to be efficient, should be not only deft, but thorough; else it was bungling, not diplomacy.  His hand did not shake in divesting the closely-written sheet of its wrapping, but in one respect his behavior was in consonance with the gentlemanly instincts he vaunted as a proof of pure old blood.  He averted his eyes lest he should see a line the lover had penned to his mistress.  The letter slipped smoothly into the quarters prepared for it—­smoothly as Satan’s mark usually goes on until his tool has made his damnation sure.

“Well done?” said Diabolus.

“That was a clever hit!” chimed in his assistant, complacently, after he had put the sealed envelope into his portfolio for safe-keeping, and burned the torn one he had removed.  “Nobody but an idiot or a madman would persist in following a girl up after such a quietus.”

He replied to Frederic’s note to himself shortly and with disdain, using the third person throughout, and informing Mr. Chilton with unmistakable distinctness that Miss Aylett had offered no opposition whatever to her brother’s will in this unfortunate affair.  So far as he—­Mr. Aylett—­could judge, her views coincided exactly with his own.  Mr. Chilton’s letters and presents should be returned to him at an early day, and thus should be finished the closing chapter of a volume which ought never to have been begun.

All this done to his mind, he set the door of his room ajar, and watched for Mabel’s passage to hers.

He had not to wait long.  The young ladies had fallen into habits of early retiring of late—­a marked change from their olden fashion of singing and talking out the midnight hour.  Himself unseen, Mr. Aylett scrutinized the two mounting the stairs side by side—­Rosa’s dark, mobile face, arch with smiles, while she chattered over a bit of country gossip she had heard that afternoon from a visitor, and the weary calm of Mabel’s visage, the drooping eyelids, and, when appealed to directly by her volatile comrade, the measured, not melancholy cadence of her answer, The girl had had a sore fight, and won a Pyrrhian victory.  She was not vanquished, but she was worsted.  Some men, upon appreciating what this meant, and how her grief had been wrought, would have had direful visitings of conscience, surrendered themselves to the mastery of doubts as to the righteousness and humanity of stringent action such as he had just consummated.  He was not unmoved.  He really loved his only sister, as proud, selfish men love those of their own lineage who have never disputed their supremacy, and derogated from their importance.  He said something under his breath before he called her, but the curse was not upon himself.