her's departure. Even at this distance of time the
memory is too inexpressibly bitter to allow me to do more than briefly
allude to them.

A fortnight after John's departure, we left Royston and removed to
Worth, wishing to get some sea-air, and to enjoy the late summer of the
south coast. Your mother seemed entirely to have recovered from her
confinement, and to be enjoying as good health as could be reasonably
expected under the circumstances of her husband's indisposition. But
suddenly one of those insidious maladies which are incidental to women
in her condition seized upon her. We had hoped and believed that all
such period of danger was already happily past; but, alas! it was not
so, and within a few hours of her first seizure all realised how serious
was her case. Everything that human skill can do under such conditions
was done, but without avail. Symptoms of blood-poisoning showed
themselves, accompanied with high fever, and within a week she was in
her coffin.

Though her delirium was terrible to watch, yet I thank God to this
day, that if she was to die, it pleased Him to take her while in an
unconscious condition. For two days before her death she recognised
no one, and was thus spared at least the sadness of passing from life
without one word of kindness or even of reconciliation from her unhappy
husband.

The communication with a place so distant as Naples was not then to be
made under fifteen or twenty days, and all was over before we could hope
that the intelligence even of his wife's illness had reached John. Both
Mrs. Temple and I remained at Worth in a state of complete prostration,
awaiting his return. When more than a month had passed without his
arrival, or even a letter to say that he was on his way, our anxiety
took a new turn, as we feared that some accident had befallen him, or
that the news of his wife's death, which would then be in his hands,
had so seriously affected him as to render him incapable of taking any
action. To repeated subsequent communications we received no answer;
but at last, to a letter which I wrote to Parnham, the servant replied,
stating that his master was still at the Villa de Angelis, and in a
condition of health little differing from that in which he left Royston,
except that he was now slightly paler if possible and thinner. It was
not till the end of November that any word came from him, and then he
wrote only one page of a sheet of note-paper to me in pencil, m