the sheets of manuscript which she had taken out of the desk
to the table at which Mr. Neal was waiting. Flushed and eager,
more beautiful than ever in the vehement agitation which still
possessed her, she stooped over him as she put the letter into
his hands, and, seizing on the means to her end with a woman's
headlong self-abandonment to her own impulses, whispered to him,
"Read it out from the beginning. I must and will hear it!" Her
eyes flashed their burning light into his; her breath beat on
his cheek. Before he could answer, before he could think, she was
back with her husband. In an instant she had spoken, and in that
instant her beauty had bent the Scotchman to her will. Frowning
in reluctant acknowledgment of his own inability to resist her,
he turned over the leaves of the letter; looked at the blank
place where the pen had dropped from the writer's hand and had
left a blot on the paper; turned back again to the beginning,
and said the words, in the wife's interest, which the wife
herself had put into his lips.

"Perhaps, sir, you may wish to make some corrections," he began,
with all his attention apparently fixed on the letter, and with
every outward appearance of letting his sour temper again get the
better of him. "Shall I read over to you what you have already
written?"

Mrs. Armadale, sitting at the bed head on one side, and the
doctor, with his fingers on the patient's pulse, sitting on
the other, waited with widely different anxieties for the answer
to Mr. Neal's question. Mr. Armadale's eyes turned searchingly
from his child to his wife.