notion than a somnambulist of the mental process that had led up
to this action. He was just dimly aware of having pushed aside
the papers and the heavy calf volumes that a moment before had
bounded his horizon, and of laying in their place, without a trace
of conscious volition, the parcel he had taken from the drawer.

The letters were tied in packets of thirty or forty. There were a
great many packets. On some of the envelopes the ink was fading;
on others, which bore the English post-mark, it was still fresh.
She had been dead hardly three years, and she had written, at
lengthening intervals, to the last. . . .

He undid one of the earlier packets--little notes written during
their first acquaintance at Hillbridge. Glennard, on leaving
college, had begun life in his uncle's law office in the old
university town. It was there that, at the house of her father,
Professor Forth, he had first met the young lady then chiefly
distinguished for having, after two years of a conspicuously
unhappy marriage, returned to the protection of the paternal roof.

Mrs. Aubyn was at that time an eager and somewhat tragic young
woman, of complex mind and undeveloped manners, whom her crude
experience of matrimony had fitted out with a stock of
generalizations that exploded like bombs in the academic air of
Hillbridge. In her choice of a husband she had been fortunate
enough, if the paradox be permitted, to light on one so signally
gifted with the faculty of putting himself in the wrong that her
leaving him had the dignity of a manifesto--made her, as it were,
the spokeswoman of outraged wifehood. In this light she was
cherished by that dominant portion of Hillbridge society which was