What burden of bliss, what secret of sorrow, lay infolded there, that at the first thought she covered it with sudden kisses, and the next, crushing it against her heart, burst into a wild weeping?  Again and again she read it, and at every word its intense magnetic strength thrilled her, rapt her from remembrance, conquered her.  She seized a pencil and wrote hurriedly:—­

“You are right.  With you I live, without you I die.  You shut heaven out from me; make earth, then, heaven.  Come to me, for I love you.  Yes, I love you.”

She did not stay to observe the contrast between her fervent sentences and the weak, faint characters that expressed them, but hastily sought the servant who was accustomed to act as postman, gave him directions to acquaint her of its reception, and watched him out of sight.  All that in the swiftness of a fever-fit.  Scarcely had the boat vanished when old thoughts rushed over her again and she would have given her life to recall it.  Returning, she found Capua eagerly searching for the lost letter, and thus learned that she was not to have received it until several hours later.

Perhaps no other woman in her situation could have done what Mrs. Laudersdale had done, without incurring more guilt.  There could be few who had been reared in such isolation as she,—­whose intellect, naturally subject to her affection, had become more so through the absence of systematic education,—­whose morality had been allowed to be merely one of instinct,—­to whom introspection had been till now a thing unknown,—­and who, accepting a husband as another child accepts a parent, had, in the whirl of gay life where she afterward reigned, found so little time for thought, and remained in such mental unsophistication as to experience now her first passion.

As Mrs. Laudersdale entered her room again, the opposite door opened and admitted that individual the selfishness of whose marriage was but half expiated when he found himself on the surplus side of the world.

In the mean while, Mr. Raleigh was gayly passing the time with Helen Heath.  There were to be some guests from the town that evening, and they were the topic of her discourse.

“I wonder if we are never to have tea,” said she at last, looking at her watch.

“I didn’t know you were attached to the custom,” said he, indifferently, as he had said everything else, while intently listening for a footstep.

“Ah! but I like to see other folks take their bitters.”

“Do not even the publicans the same?”

“You will become a proficient chemist, converting the substance of my remarks to airy nothings through your gospel-retorts.”

“Oh, I understand your optics as well.  You like to see other folks; taking the bitters is another thing.  The tea-bell is a tocsin.”

“Pshaw! You don’t care to see any one!  But shall there be no more cakes and ale?  Haven’t you any sympathy for a sweet tooth?”