Perhaps, after what I have just said, you will see the necessity of writing me an apology.  Do so, and I will willingly receive it.  I will, afterwards, if your wishes point to a second interview with me, go a step farther, and receive you.  My circumstances only enable me to invite you to tea—­not that they are at all altered for the worse by what has happened.  I have always lived, as I think I told you, well within my income, and I have saved enough, in the last twenty years, to make me quite comfortable for the rest of my life.  It is not my intention to leave Welmingham.  There are one or two little advantages which I have still to gain in the town.  The clergyman bows to me—­as you saw.  He is married, and his wife is not quite so civil.  I propose to join the Dorcas Society, and I mean to make the clergyman’s wife bow to me next.

If you favour me with your company, pray understand that the conversation must be entirely on general subjects.  Any attempted reference to this letter will be quite useless—­I am determined not to acknowledge having written it.  The evidence has been destroyed in the fire, I know, but I think it desirable to err on the side of caution, nevertheless.

On this account no names are mentioned here, nor is any signature attached to these lines:  the handwriting is disguised throughout, and I mean to deliver the letter myself, under circumstances which will prevent all fear of its being traced to my house.  You can have no possible cause to complain of these precautions, seeing that they do not affect the information I here communicate, in consideration of the special indulgence which you have deserved at my hands.  My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.

THE STORY CONTINUED BY WALTER HARTRIGHT

I

My first impulse, after reading Mrs. Catherick’s extraordinary narrative, was to destroy it.  The hardened shameless depravity of the whole composition, from beginning to end—­the atrocious perversity of mind which persistently associated me with a calamity for which I was in no sense answerable, and with a death which I had risked my life in trying to avert—­so disgusted me, that I was on the point of tearing the letter, when a consideration suggested itself which warned me to wait a little before I destroyed it.

This consideration was entirely unconnected with Sir Percival.  The information communicated to me, so far as it concerned him, did little more than confirm the conclusions at which I had already arrived.