Your
return, for example, has been quite enough excitement for to-day, and I
should keep him quiet for the next twenty-four hours."
The doctor had called within an hour of the return of Langholm, who
repeated these stipulations upstairs, with his own undertaking in regard
to Rachel. He would write that night and beg her to call the following
day. No, he preferred writing to going to see her, and it took up far
less time. But he would write at once. And, as he went downstairs to do
so then and there, Langholm asked himself whether an honorable man could
meet the Steels again without reading to their faces the notes that he
had made in London and conned in the train.
This letter written, there was a small pile of them awaiting attention
on top of the old bureau; and Langholm sat glancing at proofs and
crumpling up press-cuttings until he needed a lamp. The letter that he
kept to the last looked like one of the rare applications for his
autograph which he was not too successful to welcome as straws showing
the wind of popular approval. In opening the envelope, however, he
noticed that it bore the Northborough postmark, also that the
handwriting was that of an illiterate person, and his very surname
misspelt.
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