arrive in time to accompany me to dinner at Glastonbury House on Friday
evening, when you can congratulate my beloved fiancé, who holds you in
affectionate regard.

"I am, my dear niece, always your devoted uncle,

"FRANCIS MARKRUTE."


When Tristram finished reading he exclaimed:

"Good Lord!" For, quite absorbed in his own affairs, he had never even
noticed the financier's peregrinations! Then as he looked at the letter
again he said meditatively:

"I expect they will be awfully happy--Ethelrida is such an unselfish,
sensible, darling girl--"

And it hurt Zara even in her present mood, for she felt the contrast to
herself in his unconscious tone.

"My uncle never does anything without having calculated it will turn out
perfectly," she said bitterly--"only sometimes it can happen that he
plays with the wrong pawns."

And Tristram wondered what she meant. He and she had certainly been
pawns in one of the Markrute games, and now he began to see this object,
just as Zara had done. Then the thought came to him.--Why should he not
now ask her straight out--why she had married him? It was not from any
desire for himself, nor his position, he knew that: but for what?