She wrote and mailed it to you weeks ago--before the crash--saying, I believe, that adversity was not the time for the settlement of domestic differences, and that if her private fortune could avert disaster, you were to write immediately to her attorneys." Dysart gazed at him as though stunned; then his dull gaze fell once more on the envelope.

He examined it, went all over it with lack-lustre eyes, laid it aside, and finally began to read his wife's letter--the letter that had never reached him because he had used another name on the hotel register in Baltimore.
Grandcourt watched him with painful interest as he sat, hunched up, coughing at intervals, and poring over his wife's long, angular chirography.

There was much between the lines to read, but Dysart could never read it; much to understand, but he could never understand it.
"Delancy tells me," she wrote, "that you are threatened with very serious difficulties.

Once or twice you yourself have said as much to me; and my answer was that they no longer concerned me.
"The situation is this: I have, as you know, consulted counsel with a view to begin proceedings for a separation.

This has been discontinued--temporarily, at any rate--because I have been led to believe by your friend, Delancy Grandcourt, that the present is no time to add to your perplexities.
"He has, I may add, induced me to believe other things which my better sense rejects; but no woman's logic--which is always half sentiment--could remain unshaken by the simple loyalty to you and to me of this friend of yours and of mine.