He wondered whether he would have time to
go over to the hotel and write a letter to his father and to her. He
decided, after some difficult consideration, that he would not. There
was nothing to say that they did not know already, or that they would
fail to understand. But this suggested to him that what they had
written to him must be destroyed at once, before any stranger could
claim the right to read it. He took his letters from his pocket and
looked them over carefully. They were most unpleasant reading. They
all seemed to be about money; some begged to remind him of this or
that debt, of which he had thought continuously for the last month,
while others were abusive and insolent. Each of them gave him actual
pain. One was the last letter he had received from his father just
before leaving Paris, and though he knew it by heart, he read it over
again for the last time. That it came too late, that it asked what he
knew now to be impossible, made it none the less grateful to him, but
that it offered peace and a welcome home made it all the more
terrible.
"I came to take this step through young Hargraves, the new curate,"
his father wrote, "though he was but the instrument in the hands of
Providence.
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