How can I thank you sufficiently, my dearest Emmeline, for the affectionate letters which I have received so regularly the last month.  I am still so weak that much writing is forbidden me, and therefore to reply to them all as my affection dictates is impossible.  But I know your kind heart, my Emmeline; I know it will be satisfied, when I say your letters have indeed cheered my couch of suffering; have indeed succeeded not only in changing my thoughts from the subject that perhaps too much engrosses them, but sometimes even my poor mother’s.  Your first long letter, dated January, you tell me you wrote to let me know you as you are, that all your faults may be laid bare to my inspection; and what is to be the consequence—­that you are, as you said you would be, lowered in my estimation? no, dear and candid girl, you are not, and while you retain such ingenuousness of disposition, you never can be.  Wrong you certainly were to encourage such despondency, when so very many blessings were around you; but when once you become sensible of an error, it is already with you corrected.  Mamma has, I know, some weeks ago, written to Mrs. Hamilton, to tell her Greville Manor is to be sold.  We shall never return to it again; the haunts I so dearly loved, the scenes in which I have spent so many happy hours, all will pass into the hands of strangers,—­it will be no longer our own; we shall be no longer together, as for so many years we have been.  In changing my residence thus, I feel as if every tie I loved was torn asunder.

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I thought I could have written calmly on this subject, my Emmeline, but I believed myself stronger, both in mind and body, than I am.  I have been very ill, and therefore let that be my excuse.  Plead for me with your mother, Emmeline; tell her she knows not how I struggle to conceal every pang from the watchful eyes of that mother who has hung over my couch, with an agony that has told me plainer than words I am indeed her only joy on earth.  My spirit has been so tortured the three months of my stern father’s residence at home, that I feel as if I would—­oh! how gladly—­flee away and be at rest:  but for her sake, I pray for life, for strength; for her sake, I make no resistance to the advice of Mr. Maitland, that for a year or two we should live in Italy or Switzerland, though in leaving England I feel as if I left I know not what, but somewhat more than the mere love for my native land.  Why, why is my health so weak? why does it ever suffer when my mind is unhappy?  Oh, Emmeline, you know not the fierce struggle it is not to murmur; to feel that it is in mercy my Father in Heaven afflicts me thus.  If I might but retain my health, my mother should never suspect my sufferings, I would, I know I would, hide them from every eye; but she reads them in my failing frame and pallid features, when I would by every means in my power prove to her that while she is spared to me, I cannot be wholly unhappy.