The hand was cramped and crossed and slid all over the page. He could make out perhaps one word in five.
He sat back. Across the room, in the doorway, she had stopped with her hand on the frame, as she had stopped in the doorway of the King's Room.
"I promised you the truth," he said, "and I asked the same of you. So here it is. I cannot read this. Will you read it to me?"
She came and took the chair across the desk from him, and drew the candle closer, and read.
"'Ellerholt, the eleventh of September.
"'My dear boy,
"'If you are reading this I am dead and you are married, or else you are not married and I have wasted the last of my ink. I will assume the first, since I have never known you refuse a fight, and I have arranged it as a fight.
"'In August I had a letter from a man named Lockyer, who was surgeon to the Third Division in Spain and who was at school with your father. He wrote to me because he thought someone of your blood should know, and he did not think you would tell anyone. He was right; you have told no one, which is the most Ferrand thing you have ever done. He told me about your eyes.
"'I sat with that letter for three days. Then I sent for Lusk.
"'You will be Duke of Ellerholt within the year. You will have forty thousand acres and two hundred servants and a seat in the Lords and a great many people who will want things of you, and in a few years you will not be able to see their faces. And you will let no one help you, because you are proud, and because the one man who might have taught you to ask for help was too proud himself to write you a letter in eleven years. I am sorry for that. I am sorrier than I can put on paper.