“O death, death, death, thou ever floating cloud,   There are enough unhappy on this earth,
  Pass by the happy souls that love to live:
  I pray thee pass before my light of life
  And shadow all my soul that I may die.
  Thou weighest heavy on the heart within,
  Weigh heavy on my eyelids: let me die.”
 
 
?NONE.
 
 
 
THIS was the letter the little boy gave to the young lady in the arbour, and which without moving from her seat she opened and read. It was addressed outside correctly enough to “Mrs. Baldwin.” It was the first letter she had ever received from Ralph! She read it slowly, though it was short enough, dwelling on each phrase, each word, with the sort of hungry eagerness with which we strain our ears to catch each last precious whisper from loved lips which we know shall soon, very soon, be silent for ever.
 
“Marion,” it began, “my dearest, for I may call you that in the only letter I shall ever write to you. I said just now it was as if one of us were dying—will you try to receive what I am going to say to you as if indeed it were a dying man’s request? It may seem cruel and heartless to ask it just now, but it is my last chance; and afterwards, though you may reject it just now, my earnest entreaty may come back to your mind. What I would ask of you, my poor child, is to try to be happy. For the sake of the love you have had for me, for the sake of the love you well know I have for you, let me leave you trusting that some day you may again be at least as happy, as you were today when I so rudely destroyed the poor little fabric you had begun to build up.
 
You are so young, my child, so young and sweet-natured, and your husband you tell me is good and kind. I have seen him, and I believe he is so. Happiness cannot but to some extent return to you, if only you do not repel it by dwelling on the past or by undeserved self-reproach. Let me trust you will not do this; let me urge on you with more earnestness than I know how to put in words not to refuse or shut out from you the sunshine which will still come into your life. To know that you are happy is the one remaining great wish of my life.
 
For me it is very different. I am not young and I have been accustomed to live alone. You are the only being I ever took into my life; and I must now return to the old loneliness, only a little drearier and darker than before, for having known one short blessed glimpse of light.
 
God bless you, my dearest, and lighten to you the terrible trial it has been my bitter fate to bring upon you. Leave me the hope that some day you may be able to think of me without suffering. Forget all about me except that you had never a truer friend, or one who would more gladly sacrifice himself to ensure your well-being, than
“RALPH SEVERN.”
She read it slowly and quietly. No one observing her would have guessed from the expression of her face that its contents were of more than ordinary interest. In point of fact she hardly as yet understood it. She was still stunned and bewildered: otherwise it is probable that her first sensation on reading Ralph’s letter would have been of indignation, bitter anger at him for daring to speak to her of such a mockery as “happiness,” for thinking it possible that a human being could bear such torture as hers and live.
 
But as yet no such reflection occurred to her, no definite thought of any kind was at present possible for her. The short-lived strength which had enabled her to think and decide rightly both for herself and Ralph, had already deserted her. She was literally crushed; unable even to realize what had taken place; in a dull stupor of suffering, which to natures like hers comes instead of the physical unconsciousness, in weaker organisations succeeding to extremity of nervous tension and over-excitement.
 
After a time she grew chilly, and the sensation roused her somewhat to a consciousness of the outer world.
 
She wondered why she shivered and trembled with cold, for the sun was still shining outside, and all looked bright and warm. Then the thought occurred to her that soon Geoffrey would be returning from Bexley, and she wished she could reach her room unobserved by him or her maid. Once there, it would be easy to say she felt ill, and thus obtain some hours’ quiet and solitude in which to brace herself for what lay before her. For what lay before her, she repeated to herself. Words easy to say, but in her case what did they mean? She could not tell, could not even attempt to consider.
 
She rose from her seat, first folding and concealing the precious letter, and began slowly to walk towards the house. Her steps at first tottered a little, but gradually became steadier. There was no one about the door as she approached it, so she took courage, and succeeded in gaining her own room without meeting any one but a stupid, unobservant servant or two, who noticed nothing unusual in her appearance.
 
She looked at her face in the queer, old-fashioned toilet glass. It was pale as death, and her lips looked blue. So she drank some water, and drew down the blinds, and then in her old childish fashion threw herself down on the side of the bed, hiding her face in the pillow.
 
“Now,” she said to herself,” I will begin to think. What must I do? How can meet Geoffrey? What ought I to tell him?”
 
Hopeless questions; unanswerable at least by the poor child in the state she was in. She thought it all over, again and again, that strange scene in the garden. There was a terrible fascination about it. She reminded herself of every word he had uttered, every glance and gesture through the whole of the interview. She could not force herself to think of anything else. Geoffrey, her future life, everything but this one remembrance seemed of little consequence.
 
Gradually she found herself thinking of it all as if it had happened to some one else and not to her; as if she had seen it acted on the stage, or read it in a book; and then she seemed to have known it always. It was nothing new—the arbour, and the flowers, and the sunshine, the dark figure in the doorway, their mutual amazement, the mingled anguish and joy of their meeting, the agony of their farewell—all seemed to have been a part of her whole life; she had never been separate from it; she would evermore exist in the thought of it.
 
Then the images became confused. She was no longer herself, but some one else, who, she could not decide. Ralph, still standing in the doorway, grew strangely like Geoffrey. Again a change—the whole was a dream. She was back at Altes, with Cissy and Ralph on the terrace, and Ralph was smiling on her lovingly while she recounted to him the terrible dream that had visited her. She was asleep! From very exhaustion, both mental and physical, from extremity of suffering, though compressed into the short space of a few hours, she was for the time laid to rest in the peaceful unconsciousness, which, though the waking therefrom may be bitter, is yet, at such times, an unspeakable mercy. I am not learned in medical matters, but I believe this sleep saved her from a brain fever or worse.
 
Geoffrey came in from his visit to the stables, which had been prolonged beyond his intentions. Not finding his wife in the little sitting-room appropriated to their use, he came along the passage to seek her in her bedroom. He was not a light stepper, and his boots creaked loudly as he approached the room. But the sound did not disturb her, nor did his tap on the door. He repeated it, but with no effect. Then, imagining she must be in the garden, he opened the door, merely to glance in and satisfy himself as to her absence. The room was very dark, all the blinds drawn down, and a general air of sombreness and desertedness. No, there was her hat on the floor, and a glance at the bed revealed herself. In no very comfortable attitude, just as she had flung herself down, but fast asleep, breathing soft and regularly as an infant, and, as he looked more closely, with a sweet smile on her lips, though her face looked paler than its wont.
 
“My poor darling,” murmured Geoffrey to himself, “she has been tired with her long morning alone. I must not leave her again for so long. She looks pale too. I trust she has not been ill.”
 
And very gently he drew the bed-curtains so as to shade her still more from the light, closed the door with noiseless hand, and softly crept back along the passage to occupy himself as best he could without her, till she awoke.
 
Already he had grown very dependent upon her. Indoors especially. He never felt quite in his element in the house, his life for many years past having literally been almost altogether spent in the open air.
 
But now it was very different. Indoors meant Marion and cheerful talk, flowers and work, and books even in moderation now and then; a sweet face, and a graceful flitting figure, and tea at all hours of the day, and pipes only on sufferance! It was all so new to him, so wonderfully pretty and delicate, this atmosphere of womanhood for the first time really brought home to him, great rough clod-hopper as he called himself. And if so unspeakably charming here, in a strange, unhomelike house, what would it not be at the Manor Farm, where this sweet presence was to take root and bloom for evermore? “Till death u do part!” came into Geoffrey’s mind that afternoon, as he fidgeted about, not knowing what to do with himself, wishing she would wake, and yet afraid to go near her for fear of disturbing her. “Till death us do part!” he thought to himself. “A queer sort of life it would be without her!” After an hour or two’s patience he crept back again to her room to see if she were awake. But she was still asleep. He stood beside her for a minute or two. Just as he was turning away she awoke: awoke from her dream that the real was a dream; awoke from her sweet vision of Ralph’s dark eyes gazing down on her tenderly, to find herself back in the hateful world of facts, and Geoffrey Baldwin, her husband whom she did not love, standing at her side with a happy smile on his honest face. She glanced at him for an instant, then with a recoil of something very like actual aversion, turned from him, and closed her eyes again, as if she wished to shut out him and all beside from her sight.
 
Geoffrey did not read correctly the expression of her face, fortunately for him. He fancied only she was wearied, or in pain, and his voice sounded anxious as he spoke to her.
 
“Have I disturbed you, Marion dear? I was in the room more than an hour ago, but went away for fear of waking you. You don’t look well, but I hoped this sleep would have refreshed you. You are not in pain, my darling, are you?”
 
“Yes,” she said, without moving, or opening her eyes.
 
Considerably alarmed, Geoffrey asked eagerly “Where? How? What was the matter? Was it her head? Had she been out in the sun? Where was the pain?”
 
“Everywhere,” she replied, in the same tone.
 
Awful visions of rheumatic fever, neuralgia, every sort of illness of which, his experience being of the smallest, his horror was correspondingly great—flitted before poor Geoffrey’s vision. He carefully covered Marion with the shawl she had tossed aside, and, without speaking, turned to leave the room.
 
His step across the floor roused her.
 
“Where are you going, Geoffrey?” she asked, in a sharp, impatient tone, so unlike her own, that it increased his alarm.
 
“To call Bentley, in the first place,” he answered, hesitatingly; “and then—”
 
“Well, what then?” she persisted.
 
“To go or send for a doctor,” he replied.
 
“A doctor!” she repeated, contemptuously, muttering to herself; “a clever doctor, truly, he would be who could cure me. A doctor!” she repeated aloud. “How can you be so foolish, Geoffrey? I don’t interfere with you, why should you interfere with me? Am I not to have liberty to rest for an hour or two, without you making yourself and me absurd by talking of doctors?”
 
“But you said you were in pain remonstrated her husband, considerably relieved, and yet not a little amazed by this sudden and uncalled-for ebullition of petulance.
 
“Well, and if I did?” she replied, wearily, but more gently. “Surely, Geoffrey, you can understand there are pains and pains! I am weary and exhausted, but I want no doctor. Leave me, I beg of you, leave me alone. I want to go to sleep—and to dream,” she added, to herself.
 
Geoffrey left her, without saying more.
 
Then, when she heard his steps receding down the passage, there visited her the first of a long chain of tormentors, who from that day became no strangers to her. A pang of self-reproach darted through her, for having so cruelly wounded the heart whose only fault was its devotion to her.
 
“I have vexed him,” she thought, “vexed and hurt him for the first time since, since—that terrible mistake of ours! It is all a part of the wretched whole.” And then the ungenerous thought occurred to her—“It is his own fault. He has brought it on himself by persisting as he did. Save for that—.” And she hardened her heart against him.
 
But not for long. She had wronged him, wronged him cruelly, in thinking those few petulant words of hers would have had power, even temporarily, to chill or alienate him.
 
In five minutes he was back again, with a fragrant cup of tea and a delicate slice of bread and butter, which (forgive me, romantic readers) Marion was in her heart not sorry to see. She had eaten nothing since early morning, and violent emotion consumes the physical “tissue” no less surely than it exhausts the mental powers.
 
She drank the tea eagerly, for her throat felt parched and dry. Then with a sudden revulsion of deep pity for the man whom she began to see she had so grievously deceived, she said timidly, glancing up at him with a world of conflicting feelings in her eyes—
 
“Thank you, Geoffrey. You are very good. Are you vexed with me for being so cross?”
 
“Vexed with you, my darling!” he replied, as he had done once before; “vexed with you! No, never fancy anything so impossible.” And he stooped and kissed her on the forehead.
 
That was more than she had expected. She shrank back, half raising her hand, as if to repel him. Geoffrey looked surprised and concerned, but not hurt. The change in her would take a long time to come home to his unsuspecting heart.
 
“I did not mean to tease you,” he said. “Is your head aching? I fear, my poor dear, you are suffering very much.”
 
“Yes,” she said, “I am suffering very much. But don’t begin again about a doctor, Geoffrey,” she went on, growing excited. “I won’t see a doctor. There is nothing the matter with me that a doctor is needed for. I shall be well again by the morning, you’ll see. I won’t see a doctor.”
 
“Very well,” he said, “you know best, I suppose. What will you do? Won’t you get up a little and come into the other room? You can be quite quiet there, and I should be horribly dull by myself,” he added, wistfully, half smiling at himself as he spoke.
 
But no answering smile broke on Marion’s face. She moved impatiently, and answered coldly—
 
“I don’t know if I shall get up or not. Leave me, any way, for the present and go and smoke or something. Perhaps I will get up in a while; but oh, do go.”
 
So he went. And then, when alone, she cried with remorse for her unkindness.
 
“But I can’t help it,” she said—“I can’t help it. I don’t want to be wicked, but I am forced into it. I shall grow worse and worse, till I die. Oh, if only I might die now............