Pure delusion! they know they ought to, and so fancy they do; but they don't.

The absence of a signature gives weight, if the letter is ably written and seems true.
As for poor Bella Bruce, a dove's bosom is no more fit to rebuff a poisoned arrow than she was to combat that foulest and direst of all a miscreant's weapons, an anonymous letter.

She, in her goodness and innocence, never dreamed that any person she did not know could possibly tell a lie to wound her.

The letter fell on her like a cruel revelation from heaven.
The blow was so savage that, at first, it stunned her.
She sat pale and stupefied; but beneath the stupor were the rising throbs of coming agonies.
After that horrible stupor her anguish grew and grew, till it found vent in a miserable cry, rising, and rising, and rising, in agony.
"Mamma! mamma! mamma!" Yes; her mother had been dead these three years, and her father sat in the next room; yet, in her anguish, she cried to her mother--a cry the which, if your mother had heard, she would have expected Bella's to come to her even from the grave.
Admiral Bruce heard this fearful cry--the living calling on the dead--and burst through the folding-doors in a moment, white as a ghost.
He found his daughter writhing on the sofa, ghastly, and grinding in her hand the cursed paper that had poisoned her young life.
"My child! my child!" "Oh, papa! see! see!" And she tried to open the letter for him, but her hands trembled so she could not.
He kneeled down by her side, the stout old warrior, and read the letter, while she clung to him, moaning now, and quivering all over from head to foot.
"Why, there's no signature! The writer is a coward and, perhaps, a liar.

Stop! he offers a test.