yet who knows whether, if I try to keep a pure life and an honest purpose to walk before him worthily every day, I may not win from him at last a sort of respect and friendship that will be next to love?  I will some time let him know of the friends my literary efforts have brought me.  I know he will be proud of the judgment that scholarly men, whose opinions he honors, have placed upon the heirloom of intellectual ability that has been my sole dower from my dear father and his learned ancestors.  And when I am Ross Norval’s wife I will reveal myself to these letter-friends of my inner life, and, meeting them no longer in the spirit only, let them see eye to eye their hidden sister, their ‘nebulous child,’ as they have half playfully, half angrily, called me.  A husband’s hand shall rive the rock in which their crystal has been for years embedded.

“Oh, Ross, I shall be glad to come to my inheritance through you; to gather my band of chosen ones into my actual, as I have long held them in my inner, life; to know those at last whom my unprotected woman’s state has hitherto forbidden me to know.  And if I take him, if I give myself to him, I shall at last have the desire of my life.  Ah, Ross! you will never know that your boyish flattering, which meant nothing to you, and should have meant nothing to me, did really mean so much that it simply broke my heart, leaving me at sixteen so utterly incapable of loving any man but yourself that since then no hand has ever touched the seal which closed the fountain of love and passion in my heart for ever.  Ah!  I wonder what penalty there is for those who carelessly destroy our hopes and blot out all possibilities of love from us?  What would you say, Ross Norval, if you knew that the last kiss I ever gave to any man was given you that cold, dark day they buried my father?  You came with a note from Bell—­she was dying, she said; after to-day no one but her family would be admitted to her:  would I come and say good-bye to her, even from my father’s grave?  I went with you, and stayed an hour with her.  Then you brought me, more dead than alive, back to my desolate home, and taking me in your arms carried me from the carriage to my bed.  As you laid me down you said, ’My sister’s little friend, I am glad to have seen you once again.  Bell tells me all these years I have been absent you have been pleasant friends to each other.  You are dear and sweet because she loved you.  I shall never see you again perhaps, for when she dies I shall have no ties here and shall go elsewhere.  Kiss me good-bye,’ and I did.

“For a year after that I was alone:  then Esther Hooper came, and I was not wretched.  I have had my share of lovers and friends—­what girl has not?—­have had rare treats of music, of books and paintings, and shared their pleasant harmonies with an appreciative soul; and I have been very contented.

“But now I am desolate again, and out of the darkness you have come and beckoned me to follow you and stand near you all the rest of my life.  It will be happiness enough, as much as is good for me, to live with you, even if I am nothing to you, for, oh, I love you very faithfully!”