“A fitting epitaph, this, for Thomas Sandys,” says the paper that quotes it, “if we could not find a better.  Mr. Sandys was from first to last a man of character, but why when others falter was he always so sure-footed?  It is in the answer to this question that we find the key to the books, and to the man who was greater than the books.  He was the Perfect Lover.  As he died seeking flowers for her who had the high honour to be his wife, so he had always lived.  He gave his affection to her, as our correspondent Miss (or Mrs.) Ailie McLean shows, in his earliest boyhood, and from this, his one romance, he never swerved.  To the moment of his death all his beautiful thoughts were flowers plucked for her; his books were bunches of them gathered to place at her feet.  No harm now in reading between the lines of his books and culling what is the common knowledge of his friends in the north, that he had to serve a long apprenticeship before he won her.  For long his attachment was unreciprocated, though she was ever his loyal friend, and the volume called ‘Unrequited Love’ belongs to the period when he thought his life must be lived alone.  The circumstances of their marriage are at once too beautiful and too painful to be dwelt on here.  Enough to say that, should the particulars ever be given to the world, with the simple story of his life, a finer memorial will have been raised to him than anything in stone, such as we see a committee is already being formed to erect.  We venture to propose as a title for his biography, ’The Story of the Perfect Lover.’”

Yes, that memorial committee was formed; but so soon do people forget the hero of yesterday’s paper that only the secretary attended the first meeting, and he never called another.  But here, five and twenty years later, is the biography, with the title changed.  You may wonder that I had the heart to write it.  I do it, I have sometimes pretended to myself, that we may all laugh at the stripling of a rogue, but that was never my reason.  Have I been too cunning, or have you seen through me all the time?  Have you discovered that I was really pitying the boy who was so fond of boyhood that he could not with years become a man, telling nothing about him that was not true, but doing it with unnecessary scorn in the hope that I might goad you into crying:  “Come, come, you are too hard on him!”

Perhaps the manner in which he went to his death deprives him of these words.  Had the castle gone on fire that day while he was at tea, and he perished in the flames in a splendid attempt to save the life of his enemy (a very probable thing), then you might have felt a little liking for him.  Yet he would have been precisely the same person.  I don’t blame you, but you are a Tommy.

Grizel knew how he died.  She found Lady Pippinworth’s letter to him, and understood who the woman was; but it was only in hopes of obtaining the lost manuscript that she went to see her.  Then Lady Pippinworth told her all.  Are you sorry that Grizel knew?  I am not sorry—­I am glad.  As a child, as a girl, and as a wife, the truth had been all she wanted, and she wanted it just the same when she was a widow.  We have a right to know the truth; no right to ask anything else from God, but the right to ask that.