bay, but she accepted the inevitable and told her mother that
she had some MSS. to register, and did not care to entrust them to other
hands. It was a consolation to know that eighteen pounds were safely
despatched, but she was bitterly unhappy, and the fear that money might
be wanting in the last and most terrible hours bound her to her desk as
with a chain; and when her tired and exhausted brain ceased to formulate
phrases, the picture of the lonely room, the night walks, and the
suffering of the jaded girl, stared her in the face with a terrible
distinctness. Her only moments of gladness were when the post brought a
cheque from London. Sometimes they were for a pound, sometimes for
fifteen shillings. Once she received five pounds ten--it was for her
story. On the 10th of September she received the following letter:

'DARLING ALICE,
'Thanks a thousand times for your last letter, and the money enclosed.
It came in the nick of time, for I was run almost to my last penny. I
did not write before, because I didn't feel in the humour to do
anything. Thank goodness! I'm not sick any more, though I don't know
that it isn't counterbalanced by the dreadful faintness and the constant
movement. Isn't it awful to sit here day after day, watching myself, and
knowing the only relief I shall get will be after such terrible pain? I
woke up last night crying with the terror of it. Cervassi says there are
cases on record of painless confinements, and in my best moods I think
mine is to be one of them. I know it is wrong to write all these things
to a good girl like you, but I think talking about it is part of the
complaint, and poor sinner me has no one to talk to. Do you remember my
old black cashmere? I've been altering it till there's hardly a bit of
the original body left; but now the skirt is adding to my troubles by
getting shorter and shorter in front. It is now quite six inches off the
ground, and instead of fastening it I have to pin the placket-hole, and
then it falls nearly right. . . . Only three weeks longer, and then. . .
But there, I won't look forward, because I know I am going to die, and
all the accounting for it, and everything else, will be on your
shoulders. Good-bye, dear; I shan't write again, at least not till
afterwards. And if there is an afterward, I shall never be able to thank
you properly; but still I think it will be a weight off you. Is it so,
dear? Do you wish I were dead? I know you don't. It was unki