Your own,

E.B.B. to R.B.

[Post-marks, Mis-sent to Mitcham.  February 19 and 20, 1846.]

Best and kindest of all that ever were to be loved in dreams, and wondered at and loved out of them, you are indeed!  I cannot make you feel how I felt that night when I knew that to save me an anxious thought you had come so far so late—­it was almost too much to feel, and is too much to speak.  So let it pass.  You will never act so again, ever dearest—­you shall not.  If the post sins, why leave the sin to the post; and I will remember for the future, will be ready to remember, how postmen are fallible and how you live at the end of a lane—­and not be uneasy about a silence if there should be one unaccounted for.  For the Tuesday coming, I shall remember that too—­who could forget it?...  I put it in the niche of the wall, one golden lamp more of your giving, to throw light purely down to the end of my life—­I do thank you.  And the truth is, I should have been in a panic, had there been no letter that evening—­I was frightened the day before, then reasoned the fears back and waited:  and if there had been no letter after all—.  But you are supernaturally good and kind.  How can I ever ‘return’ as people say (as they might say in their ledgers) ... any of it all?  How indeed can I who have not even a heart left of my own, to love you with?

I quite trust to your promise in respect to the medical advice, if walking and rest from work do not prevent at once the recurrence of those sensations—­it was a promise, remember.  And you will tell me the very truth of how you are—­and you will try the music, and not be nervous, dearest.  Would not riding be good for you—­consider.  And why should you be ‘alone’ when your sister is in the house?  How I keep thinking of you all day—­you cannot really be alone with so many thoughts ... such swarms of thoughts, if you could but see them, drones and bees together!

George came in from Westminster Hall after we parted yesterday and said that he had talked with the junior counsel of the wretched plaintiffs in the Ferrers case, and that the belief was in the mother being implicated, although not from the beginning.  It was believed too that the miserable girl had herself taken step after step into the mire, involved herself gradually, the first guilt being an extravagance in personal expenses, which she lied and lied to account for in the face of her family.  ‘Such a respectable family,’ said George, ’the grandfather in court looking venerable, and everyone indignant upon being so disgraced by her!’ But for the respectability in the best sense, I do not quite see.  That all those people should acquiesce in the indecency (according to every standard of English manners in any class of society) of thrusting the personal expenses of a member of their family on Lord Ferrers, she still bearing their name—­and in those peculiar circumstances of her supposed position too—­where