boiled at once. He made tea on the hearth-rug and ate the
biscuits which Mrs. Aberdeen had brought for him up from
Anderson's. "Gentlemen," she said, "must learn to give and take."
He sighed again and again, like one who had escaped from danger.
With his head on the fender and all his limbs relaxed, he felt
almost as safe as he felt once when his mother killed a ghost in
the passage by carrying him through it in her arms. There was no
ghost now; he was frightened at reality; he was frightened at the
splendours and horrors of the world.

A letter from Miss Pembroke was on the table. He did not hurry to
open it, for she, and all that she did, was overwhelming. She
wrote like the Sibyl; her sorrowful face moved over the stars and
shattered their harmonies; last night he saw her with the eyes of
Blake, a virgin widow, tall, veiled, consecrated, with her hands
stretched out against an everlasting wind. Whv should she write?
Her letters were not for the likes of him, nor to be read in
rooms like his.

"We are not leaving Sawston," she wrote. "I saw how selfish it
was of me to risk spoiling Herbert's career. I shall get used to
any place. Now that he is gone, nothing of that sort can matter.
Every one has been most kind, but you have comforted me most,
though you did not mean to. I cannot think how you did it, or
understood so much. I still think of you as a little boy with a
lame leg,--I know you will let me say this,--and yet when it came
to the point you knew more than people who have been all their
lives with sorrow and death."

Rickie burnt this letter, which he ought not to have done, for it