re always
good, we three. But now I am alone, for they will never let Dolores
back. She grew so thin--my heart ached for her._

"_Adieu, adieu--I have tried to hate you, as I ought, but your grey
eyes look and look at me in the night, and I feel you tapping my
fingers as you used to do--oh, if they will let me I will pray for you
every day till I die, and Our Lady will remember that you were always
good until he looked at you!_

"_For the last time--_

"_Your Josephine._"

Under this letter was hidden a crude little sketch of the cloister-end
of some building on a sheet of drawing-paper, and near it, just
outside a high wall, a fair outline of a thick cypress. There was
nothing else in the box.

Nor did we ever learn another word or syllable of the life of those
two in their lonely cottage. Whether Prynne built it himself or hired
labourers for the work we never tried to discover. That he buried
himself there with the passion of his lonely life, that these flaming
lovers, cast off by God and the world, thought both well lost for what
they found in each other, who can doubt? The love she inspired in him
I can understand, for I have known her daughter; the love he woke in
her, she being what she was, I do not dare to guess. What must that
woman's soul have been? What storm of love must have swept her from
her cloister-harbour--and on to what rocks, over what eternal depths!
Deal gently with her, Church of her betrayal! Forgive her sins, I beg
you, for she loved much.

CHAPTER XXII

FATE LAUGHS AND BAITS HER HOOK

I find to my surprise that these rambling chapters, intended, in the
first place, as a sort of study of Margarita's development under the
shock of applied civilisation, have grown rather into a chronicle of
family history, a detail of tiny intimate events and memories that
must surely disappoint Dr. M----l, at whose urgent instance they were
undertaken. Margarita was, indeed, at that time, a fit subject for the
thoughtful scientist, and hardly one of her conversations with her
friends but would serve as a text for some learned psychological
dissertation. But it would have been hard, even for a stony _savant_,
to dissect that adorable personality! The points that I had intended
to discuss are lost, I find, in her smile; the interest of her
relations with the world, as it burst upon her in all its
complications and problems, a grown woman, but ignorant as a s