We are ready for the marriage ceremony, and listen for the wedding march and happy jingle of village bells; or if we may not have these in Puritan days, at least we may hear the pompous magistrate pronounce the blessing of the State over its two happy subjects.  But no!  There is yet a moment of suspense, a last trial to the lover’s constancy.  The bride is taken dangerously ill, so dangerously ill that the doctors rejoice when the disease pronounces itself to be small-pox.  Alas! who shall now say what are the inmost thoughts of our Dorothy?  Does she not need all her faith in her lover, in herself, ay, and in God, to uphold her in this new affliction?  She rises from her bed, her beauty of face destroyed; her fair looks living only on the painter’s canvas, unless we may believe that they were etched in deeply bitten lines on Temple’s heart.  But the skin beauty is not the firmest hold she has on Temple’s affections; this was not the beauty that had attracted her lover and held him enchained in her service for seven years of waiting and suspense; this was not the only light leading him through dark days of doubt, almost of despair, constant, unwavering in his troth to her.  Other beauty not outward, of which we, too, may have seen something, mirrowed darkly in these letters; which we, too, as well as Temple, may know existed in Dorothy.  For it is not beauty of face and form, but of what men call the soul, that made Dorothy to Temple, in fact as she was in name,—­the gift of God.

Appendix

LADY TEMPLE

Of Lady Temple there is very little to be known, and what there is can be best understood by following the career of her husband, which has been written at some length, and with laboured care, by Mr. Courtenay.  After her marriage, which took place in London, January 31st, 1655, they lived for a year at the home of a friend in the country.  They then removed to Ireland, where they lived for five years with Temple’s father; Lady Giffard, Temple’s widowed sister, joining them.  In 1663 they were living in England.  Lady Giffard continued to live with them through the rest of their lives, and survived them both.  In 1665 Temple was sent to Brussels as English representative, and his family joined him in the following year.  In 1668 he was removed from Brussels to the Hague, where the successful negotiations which led to the Triple Alliance took place, and these have given him an honourable place in history.  There is a letter of Lady Temple’s, written to her husband in 1670, which shows how interested she was in the part he took in political life, and how he must have consulted her in all State matters.  It is taken from Courtenay’s Life of Sir William Temple, vol. i. p. 345.  He quotes it as the only letter written after Lady Temple’s marriage which has come into his hands.

THE HAGUE, October 31st, 1670.