lf, is very patient, quite
unlike the other and more common form of the passion; not love, but a
diseased craving to be loved, which causes a thousand imaginary miseries
and wrongs. Sharp was her pain, poor girl; but she was not angry, and
after her first stab of disappointment her courage rose. All was well
with him; he had been seen cheerily starting for Edinburgh; and her own
temporary suffering was a comparatively a small thing. It could not
last: the letter would come tomorrow.

But it did not, nor the next day, nor the next. On the fourth day her
heart felt like to break.

I think, of all pains not mortal, few are worse than this small silent
agony of waiting for the post; letting all the day's hope climax upon a
single minute, which passes by, and the hope with it, and then comes
another day of dumb endurance, if not despair. This even with ordinary
letters upon which any thing of moment depends. With others, such as
this letter of Robert Roy's--let us not speak of it. Some may imagine,
others may have known, a similar suspense. They will understand why,
long years afterward, Fortune Williams was heard to say, with a quiver of
the lip that could have told its bitter tale, "No; when I have a letter
to write, I never put off writing it for single day."

As these days wore on--these cruel days, never remembered without a
shiver of pain, and of wonder that she could have lived through them at
all--the whole fabric of reasons, arguments, excuses, that she had built
up, for him and herself, gradually crumbled away. Had she altogether
misapprehended the purport of his promised letter? Was it just some
ordinary note, about her boys and their studies perhaps, which, after
all, he had not thought it worthwhile to write? Yet surely it was worth
while, if only to send a kindly and courteous farewell to a friend, after
so close an intimacy and in face of so indefinite a separation.

A friend? Only a friend? Words may deceive, eyes seldom can. And there
had been love in his eyes. Not mere liking, but actual love. She had
seen it, felt it, with that almost unerring instinct that women have,
whether they return the love or not. In the latter case, they seldom
doubt it; in the former, they often do.

"Could I have been mistaken?" she thought, with a burning pang of shame.
"Oh, why did he not speak--just one word? After that, I could have borne
any thing."

But he had not spoken, had not written. He had let