pon her. She
found when she did attempt it, that she could have done it better if
she had done it at the moment when she was writing the other letter
to her cousin George. Then Kate had been near her, and she had been
comforted by Kate's affectionate happiness. She had been strengthened
at that moment by a feeling that she was doing the best in her power,
if not for herself, at any rate for others. All that comfort and
all that strength had left her now. The atmosphere of the fells had
buoyed her up, and now the thick air of London depressed her. She sat
for hours with the pen in her hand, and could not write the letter.
She let a day go by and a night, and still it was not written.
She hardly knew herself in her unnatural weakness. As the mental
photographs of the two men forced themselves upon her, she could
not force herself to forget those words--"Look here, upon this
picture--and on this." How was it that she now knew how great was
the difference between the two men, how immense the pre-eminence of
him whom she had rejected;--and that she had not before been able
to see this on any of those many previous occasions on which she had
compared the two together? As she thought of her cousin George's face
when he left her room a few days since, and remembered Mr Grey's
countenance when last he held her hand at Cheltenham, the quiet
dignity of his beauty which would submit to show no consciousness
of injury, she could not but tell herself that when Paradise had
been opened to her, she had declared herself to be fit only for
Pandemonium. In that was her chief misery; that now,--now when it was
too late,--she could look at it aright.

But the letter must be written, and on the second day she declared to
herself that she would not rise from her chair till it was done. The
letter was written on that day and was posted. I will now ask the
reader to go down with me to Nethercoats that we may be present with
John Grey when he received it. He was sitting at breakfast in his
study there, and opposite to him, lounging in an arm-chair, with a
_Quarterly_ in his hand, was the most intimate of his friends, Frank
Seward, a fellow of the college to which they had both belonged. Mr
Seward was a clergyman, and the tutor of his college, and a man who
worked very hard at Cambridge. In the days of his leisure he spent
much of his time at Nethercoats, and he was the only man to whom Grey
had told anything of his love for Alice and of his dis