It scarcely needs to be stated that Ethel Thursby\'s letter to Launce Keymer was written with the full knowledge and sanction of her aunts. When the particulars of her interview with Hetty Blair were told them, they could but hold up their hands in horrified amazement. Their worst fears, never even hinted at to Ethel, had been more than realised; there could no longer be any doubt as to the nature of the motives by which Keymer had been influenced. His treatment of Ethel had been bad enough, but his treatment of Hetty Blair revealed a depth of depravity which caused the gentle hearts of the sisters at once to shiver with affright and glow with thankfulness when they called to mind their darling\'s narrow escape from being united for life to such a man.

"I little thought I should live to see the day when I could truthfully say, \'I am glad our money has been taken from us,\'" remarked Miss Matilda. "But, here and now, I can say it. To the loss of our money we owe it that Ethel is not by this time Mr. Launce Keymer\'s wife. It was one of those blessings in disguise at which we are prone to cavil because we fail at the time to recognise them for what they really are."

"But we ought not to forget what we owe to Miss Blair in the matter," suggested Miss Jane with that touch of deference due from her as second sister for the time being. "Her revelation would of itself have more than supplied cause enough for breaking off the match."

"Truly so, sister, if it had reached our ears in time; but we have no proof that it would have done so. Had Mr. Keymer not left home, he would probably have found means to defeat her object, and, in addition, would most likely have pressed for the marriage to take place as early as possible."

"In any case, we can never be sufficiently thankful that matters have fallen out as they have. I declare my nerves are all a-tingle at the thought of what Ethel has escaped."

"And I have dropped my stitch six times since she told us--a thing which never happened to me before."

"I was brought up in the belief that when men were bad--of course I mean very bad indeed--their wicked qualities rarely failed to make themselves apparent in their looks, or their manner, or--or in some other way, so that people of even ordinary discernment could be on their guard against them and not credit them with virtues they could lay no claim to. But Mr. Keymer had always such a pleasant, smiling, indeed, I might almost say fascinating way with him, that it seems difficult to connect him in one\'s thoughts with the actions of which we are now assured he was guilty."

Miss Jane spoke a little plaintively, like one who had lost another of the few illusions which advancing years had left her.

"I am afraid, sister," answered Miss Matilda, "that this notion of bad people having, as it were, the trade-mark of their evil natures stamped upon them for everybody to see, like many other of the traditions which one picks up in childhood, fails utterly when put to the proof. Mr. Keymer had certainly very pleasant manners and could make himself most agreeable. Yet we have it on Shakespeare\'s authority that a man \'may smile, and smile, and yet be a villain.\'"

Ethel had not been present while the foregoing conversation took place. After imparting to her aunts everything told her by Miss Blair, she had gone to her own room to write the letter which, a little later, was received and opened by Mr. Keymer in his son\'s absence.

She now came back with the letter open in her hand, and going up to Miss Matilda, said: "Here is what I have written, dear aunt. Please to read it and tell me whether it is quite what you would like me to say."

Miss Matilda took the letter in silence, and when she had read it passed it on to her sister. Miss Jane having read it, also in silence, returned it to her sister, who then cleared her voice and drew herself up a little more stiffly.

"My dear child," she said to Ethel, "after a careful perusal of your epistle, I fail to see the slightest necessity for adding to it, or altering it by so much as a single word. It is severe, but not unduly so considering the circumstances which have given rise to it, and you seem to me to have nowhere overstepped that impalpable boundary which, be the nature of her communication whatever it may, no gentlewoman who respects herself can afford to ignore."

Here Miss Matilda paused and looked inquiringly at Miss Jane. "I am in full accord, sister, with all that you have said," remarked the latter in reply to the look. "Considering the peculiar difficulties with which the dear girl had to contend, it seems to me that she has expressed herself quite admirably."

"Quite admirably," echoed Miss Matilda. "Lucidity without verbosity should be the characteristic of all epistolary communications, and I am pleased to find that in this instance, as in so many others, our dear niece has not failed to profit by our teaching." Then to Ethel she said: "You had better post the letter yourself, dear, and then no eyes but your own will have cognisance of the address."

This Ethel deferred doing till later in the day, when another errand would take her into the town. For the present she laid the letter aside and quietly resumed the sewing on which she had been engaged when Miss Blair knocked at the door. She was a shade paler than common, but perfectly composed, as, indeed, she had been when telling the sisters Hetty\'s news. They now glanced at her and then at each other.

Not for the world would either of the sisters have been willing that their dear girl should imagine their hearts did not bleed for her in her trouble, and yet they felt that her very quietude imposed upon them a certain restraint in the expression of the sympathy they were longing to give vent to. Miss Jane, who was the more romantic of the two and still retained a vivid recollection of several of the heroines of the Rosa Matilda school of fiction on which her fancy had been nourished when a young woman scarcely out of her teens, would have held it to be no more than appropriate if, at the close of her interview with Miss Blair, Ethel had rushed into the sitting-room, her hair unbound and disordered and a frenzied glare in her eyes, and after a few incoherent exclamations, had either swooned right away, or gone off into violent hysterics. All Miss Jane\'s heroines had been addicted either to swooning or hysterics at the tragic crises of their lives, and that Ethel had failed to follow so proper an example was just a trifle disappointing.

To Miss Matilda it seemed that the sooner Ethel was encouraged to open her heart and seek from others that sympathy which, when we know it to be genuine, rarely fails to carry with it some measure of comfort, the better it would be for her. "And yet," she added to herself by way of afterthought, "it is not expected of the patient that he should probe his own wounds; it rests with others to do that. Just as likely as not, the dear girl wonders and feels hurt because neither my sister nor I by as much as a word have led her on to unbosom herself to us. She is evidently waiting for me to speak, and yet how to begin, or what to say, I know not."

She let her hands drop on her lap with a faint sigh. Her thimble fell unheeded on the floor. She was sitting by one of the two open windows and her gaze strayed out into the sunlit garden, while there came into her face a look of such perplexity and distress that Et............