not even know where you are, and address this at random. I need not say, dear Bertram, how pleased I should be to see you again; but I am afraid you have quite forgotten me. Why, it is—how long is it, since you last wrote to me? I last heard from you at Montenotte in the autumn of—! How long ago is that? You ought to be ashamed to think!
But here is time and space and patience all exhausted. I must end, as usual, in a hurry. Write to me and tell me what you are doing. You know that, if for no other reason than because you were loved by what I loved best in the world, you are and always must be dear to me: and so let me write myself down as being what, I trust, I always shall be,—Your friend, Rayne Gwatkin.
I lay still for a time and thought about what I had read, and then re-read it, and thought of the past that concerned all this strange present, and of my whole life. And so at last I got up and went to my small polished-oak box (a small box in which I kept certain things that were, or had once seemed, precious to me), and, having opened it, found a letter, which began:
'My dear Bertram,—'It is a wet and tempestuous afternoon, and therefore I consider it a fitting occasion to answer your long and with difficulty decipherable epistle.'
Through this letter I glanced, till I came to words that stopped my glancing and steadied it:
'… Rather a tempest going on outside, and so I am going to try to dodge my dear old daddy and Sir James, and get out my boat and enjoy it.—By-the-by, I had forgotten to tell you that an old friend of ours, Sir James Gwatkin, has been staying with us this last week. He is a most amusing mondain en villégiature, with a marvellous French and Italian accent, and altogether a very amusing companion to the father, and myself at times. He knows what seems to me a great deal about…'
And I folded up the letter and put it into the box, and relocked the box, went back to bed; and lay thinking for another half-hour, when I got up and dressed.
At breakfast I reconsidered the matter:
The news amounted to this: Rayne had married the
