Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 4).djvu/163

 the comparison, which was foolish of him, poor fellow.

"She said," he went on, " that she could trust her own judgment, and did not want anybody else's. That might have satisfied anybody, but it did not satisfy me. I wrote again, and begged her to do as I wished, telling her about the housekeeper. At last she wrote that she had done to please me what she never would have done for herself, and she said: 'I suppose you expect me to abide by whatever Miss Harris may say.'

"Do you know that those words gave me a fright. I had never doubted till then that Miss Harris would give just the same character of me as she had done before, and also I had only thought of it as giving me more value to Miss Woodroffe. I got nervous after I heard she had really consulted the Sibyl, and two days later I received these."

He turned over his pocket-book again and handed to me two papers, sinking back in his chair after he had done so with a gesture that said, "You have the catastrophe and its results before you."

I opened one of the papers, and literally I opened it with trembling fingers. There was something tragical in poor John's gesture, and in the emptiness and silence of the house. My eyes fell upon a sheet of paper, half covered with a neat, legible handwriting, the words of which were much as follows:—

"This writing belongs to a person of singularly impulsive and eager temperament, easily carried away by the feeling of