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Do you wonder at this conduct? I take it, it is common enough. May Forestfield was no peculiar character, and in some things had a certain clearness of sense and strength of mind; but she was a woman, and consequently when she found she had been deprived of something which up to this point she did not value, but which it was impossible to regain, she set about grieving after and bewailing its loss with all her strength. Never even in the early days of her acquaintance with Lord Forestfield, when uncertainty of his regard for her rendered her doubly keen in the chase, had she felt that worship, that hungering after him which now beset her.

While she was lying in this state she received the following letter, dated from Spa:

'You will have been surprised at my silence and apparent desertion of you, but I waited until I could learn what steps that scoundrel who calls himself your husband was about to take. I knew him to be too great a coward to ask satisfaction of me, but I doubted whether, knowing with what a character he himself must come into court, he would venture to claim the aid of the law. I learn now that he has done so, and that in a short time you are likely to be free. His plots were too skilfully concocted, his spies too carefully trained, to allow of there being any doubt in the matter; the court will pronounce for the divorce, and he will be at liberty to carry to its end a pursuit in which he has been long engaged.