“Yes, do,” they all cried; and the boy bounded off full of fun, greeting the postman with such a burst of merry apostrophe, that the man shook with laughing at him.

“Here it is at last,” said Wildney.  “Now, then, for the key.  Here’s a letter for me, hurrah!—­two for you, Miss Trevor—­what people you young ladies are for writing to each other!  None for you, Monty—­Oh, yes!  I’m wrong, here’s one; but none for Eric.”

“I expected none,” said Eric sighing; but his eye was fixed earnestly on one of Mrs. Trevor’s letters.  He saw that it was from India, and directed in his father’s hand.

Mrs. Trevor caught his look.  “Shall I read it aloud to you, dear I Do you think you can stand it?  Remember it will be in answer to ours, telling them of—­”

“Oh, yes, yes,” he said, eagerly, “do let me hear it.”

With instinctive delicacy Montagu and Wildney rose, but Eric pressed them to stay.  “It will help me to bear what mother says, if I see you by me,” he pleaded.

God forbid that I should transcribe that letter.  It was written from the depths of such sorrow as He only can fully sympathise with, who for thirty years pitched his tent in the valley of human misery.  By the former mail Mrs. Williams had heard of Verny’s melancholy death; by the next she had been told that her only other child, Eric, was not dead indeed, but a wandering outcast, marked with the brand of terrible suspicion.  Let her agony be sacred; it was God who sent it, and he only enabled her to endure it.  With bent head, and streaming eyes, and a breast that heaved involuntarily with fitful sobs, Eric listened as though to his mother’s voice, and only now and then he murmured low to himself, “O mother, mother, mother—­but I am forgiven now.  O mother, God and man have forgiven me, and we shall be at peace again once more.”

Mrs. Trevor’s eyes grew too dim with weeping, to read it all, and Fanny finished it.  “Here is a little note from your father, Eric, which dropped out when we opened dear aunt’s letter.  Shall I read it, too?”

“Perhaps not now, love,” said Mrs. Trevor.  “Poor Eric is too tired and excited already.”

“Well, then, let me glance it myself, aunty,” he said.  He opened it, read a line or two, and then, with a scream, fell back swooning, while it dropped out of his hands.

Terrified, they picked up the fallen paper; it told briefly, in a few heartrending words, that, after writing the letter, Mrs. Williams had been taken ill; that her life was absolutely despaired of, and that, before the letter reached England, she would, in all human probability, be dead.  It conveyed the impression of a soul resigned indeed, and humble, but crushed down to the very earth with the load of mysterious bereavement, and irretrievable sorrow.

“Oh, I have killed her, I have killed my mother!” said Eric, in a hollow voice, when he came to himself.  “O God, forgive me, forgive me!”