them over at your leisure when you get home. You can bring them back
before you leave Lidford."

Mr. Fenton glanced at Marian to see if she had any objection to his
reading the letters. She was quite silent, looking absently at the
trinkets lying in the tray before her.

"You don't mind my reading your father's letters, Marian?" he asked.

"Not at all. Only I think you will find them very uninteresting."

"I am interested in everything that concerns you."

He put the papers in his pocket, and sat up for an hour in his room that
night reading Percival Nowell's love letters. They revealed very little
to him, except the unmitigated selfishness of the writer. That quality
exhibited itself in every page. The lovers had met for the first time at
the house of some Mr. Crosby, in whose family Miss Geoffry seemed to be
living; and there were clandestine meetings spoken of in the Regent's
Park, for which reason Gilbert supposed Mr. Crosby's house must have been
in that locality. There were broken appointments, for which Miss Geoffry
was bitterly reproached by her lover, who abused the whole Crosby
household in a venomous manner for having kept her at home at these
times.

"If you loved me, as you pretend, Lucy," Mr. Nowell wrote on one
occasion, "you would speedily exchange this degrading slavery for liberty
and happiness with me, and would be content to leave the future _utterly_
in my hands, without question or fear. A really generous woman would do
this."