The Last Chronicle of Barset

she could not divert her mind from the inquiry. It was, at any rate, a fact that there must be some woman designated by the letters⁠—some woman who had, at any rate, chosen to call herself M. D. And John Eames had called her M. There must, at any rate, be such a woman. This female, be she who she might, had thought it worth her while to make this inquiry about John Eames, and had manifestly learned something of Lily’s own history. And the woman had pledged herself not to interfere with John Eames, if L. D. would only condescend to say that she was engaged to him! As Lily thought of the proposition, she trod upon the letter for the third time. Then she picked it up, and having no place of custody under lock and key ready to her hand, she put it in her pocket.

At night, before she went to bed, she showed the letter to Emily Dunstable. “Is it not surprising that any woman could bring herself to write such a letter?” said Lily.

But Miss Dunstable hardly saw it in the same light. “If anybody were to write me such a letter about Bernard,” said she, “I should show it to him as a good joke.”

“That would be very different. You and Bernard, of course, understand each other.”

“And so will you and Mr. Eames⁠—some day, I hope.”

“Never more than we do now, dear. The thing that annoys me is that such a woman as that should have even heard my name at all.”

“As long as people have got ears and tongues, people will hear other people’s names.”

Lily paused a moment, and then spoke again, asking another question. “I suppose this woman does know him? She must know him, because he has written to her.”

“She knows something about him, no doubt, and has some reason for wishing that you should quarrel with him. If I were you, I should take care not to gratify her. As for Mr. Eames’s note, it is a joke.”

“It is nothing to me,” said Lily.

“I suppose,” continued Emily, “that most gentlemen become acquainted with some people that they would not wish all their friends to know that they knew. They go about so much more than we do, and meet people of all sorts.”

“No gentleman should become intimately acquainted with a woman who could write such a letter as that,” said Lily. And as she spoke she remembered a certain episode to John Eames’s early life, which had reached her from a source which she had not doubted, and which had given her pain and offended her. She had believed that John Eames had in that case behaved cruelly to a young woman, and had thought that her offence had come simply from that feeling. “But of course it is nothing to me,” she said. “Mr. Eames can choose his friends as he likes. I only wish that my name might not be mentioned to them.”

“It is not from him that she has heard it.”

“Perhaps not. As I said before, of course it does not signify; only there is something very disagreeable in the whole thing. The idea is so hateful! Of course this woman means me to understand that she considers herself to have a claim upon Mr. Eames, and that I stand in her way.”

“And why should you not stand in her way?”

“I will stand in nobody’s way. Mr. Eames has a right to give his hand to anyone that he pleases. I, at any rate, can have no cause of offence against him. The only thing is that I do wish that my name could be left alone.” Lily, when she was in her own room again, did destroy the letter; but before she did so she read it again, and it became so indelibly impressed on her memory that she could not forget even the words of it. The lady who wrote had pledged herself, under certain conditions, “not to interfere with Miss L. D.”

“Interfere with me!” Lily said to herself; “nobody can interfere with me; nobody has power to do so.” As she turned it over in her mind, her heart became hard against John Eames. No woman would have troubled herself to write such a letter without some cause for the writing. That the writer was vulgar, false, and unfeminine, Lily thought that she could perceive from the letter itself; but no doubt the woman knew John Eames, had some interest in the question of his marriage, and was entitled to some answer to her question;⁠—only was not entitled to such answer from Lily Dale.

For some weeks past now, up to the hour at which this anonymous letter had reached her hands, Lily’s heart had been growing soft and still softer towards John Eames; and now again it had become hardened. I think that the appearance of Adolphus Crosbie in the park, that momentary vision of the real man by which the divinity of the imaginary Apollo had been dashed to the ground, had done a service to the cause of the other lover; of the lover who had never been a god, but who of late years had at any rate grown into the full dimensions of a man. Unfortunately for the latter, he had commenced his lovemaking when he was but little more than a boy. Lily, as she had thought of the two together, in the days of her solitude, after she had been deserted by Crosbie, had ever pictured to herself the lover whom she had preferred as having something godlike in his favour, as being far the superior in wit, in manner, in acquirement, and in personal advantage. There had been good nature and true hearty love on the side of the other man; but circumstances had seemed to show that his good-nature was equal to all, and that he was able to share even his hearty love among two or three. A man