o live an
unloved wife--so near and yet so far from him to whom I am bound? Will it
not be a death in life? Will it be better than this dead, cold monotony I
now bear? Better or worse? Ah, there's the rub! I can never hope to win
his faithful, abiding love. Even did use make me acceptable to him, I
could not trust its continuance. And yet who knows whether, if I try to
keep a pure life and an honest purpose to walk before him worthily every
day, I may not win from him at last a sort of respect and friendship that
will be next to love? I will some time let him know of the friends my
literary efforts have brought me. I know he will be proud of the judgment
that scholarly men, whose opinions he honors, have placed upon the
heirloom of intellectual ability that has been my sole dower from my dear
father and his learned ancestors. And when I am Ross Norval's wife I will
reveal myself to these letter-friends of my inner life, and, meeting them
no longer in the spirit only, let them see eye to eye their hidden sister,
their 'nebulous child,' as they have half playfully, half angrily, called
me. A husband's hand shall rive the rock in which their crystal has been
for years embedded.

"Oh, Ross, I shall be glad to come to my inheritance through you; to
gather my band of chosen ones into my actual, as I have long held them in
my inner, life; to know those at last whom my unprotected woman's state
has hitherto forbidden me to know. And if I take him, if I give myself to
him, I shall at last have the desire of my life. Ah, Ross! you will never
know that your boyish flattering, which meant nothing to you, and should
have meant nothing to me, did really mean so much that it simply broke my
heart, leaving me at sixteen so utterly incapable of loving any man but
yourself that since then no hand has ever touched the seal which closed
the fountain of love and passion in my heart for ever. Ah! I wonder what
penalty there is for those who carelessly destroy our hopes and blot out
all possibilities of love from us? What would you say, Ross Norval, if you
knew that the last kiss I ever gave to any man was given you that cold,
dark day they buried my father? You came with a note from Bell--she was
dying, she said; after to-day no one but her family would be admitted to
her: would I come and say good-bye to her, even from my father's grave? I
went with you, and stayed an hour with her. Then you brought me, more dead
than alive, back to my desol