could have rendered me capable.  Their faith in me, and undeviating affection for me, I shall be grateful for to the end of my existence, and to the extent of my power of feeling gratitude.  My dearest sisters!—­especially, let me say, my own beloved Arabel, who, with no consolation except the exercise of a most generous tenderness, has looked only to what she considered my good—­never doubting me, never swerving for one instant in her love for me.  May God reward her as I cannot.  Dearest Henrietta loves me too, but loses less in me, and has reasons for not misjudging me.  But both my sisters have been faultless in their bearing towards me, and never did I love them so tenderly as I love them now.

The only time I met R.B. clandestinely was in the parish church, where we were married before two witnesses—­it was the first and only time.  I looked, he says, more dead than alive, and can well believe it, for I all but fainted on the way, and had to stop for sal volatile at a chemist’s shop.  The support through it all was my trust in him, for no woman who ever committed a like act of trust has had stronger motives to hold by.  Now may I not tell you that his genius, and all but miraculous attainments, are the least things in him, the moral nature being of the very noblest, as all who ever knew him admit?  Then he has had that wide experience of men which ends by throwing the mind back on itself and God; there is nothing incomplete in him, except as all humanity is incompleteness.  The only wonder is how such a man, whom any woman could have loved, should have loved me; but men of genius, you know, are apt to love with their imagination.  Then there is something in the sympathy, the strange, straight sympathy which unites us on all subjects.  If it were not that I look up to him, we should be too alike to be together perhaps, but I know my place better than he does, who is too humble.  Oh, you cannot think how well we get on after six weeks of marriage.  If I suffer again it will not be through him.  Some day, dearest Mrs. Martin, I will show you and dear Mr. Martin how his prophecy was fulfilled, saving some picturesque particulars.  I did not know before that Saul was among the prophets.

My poor husband suffered very much from the constraint imposed on him by my position, and did, for the first time in his life, for my sake do that in secret which he could not speak upon the housetops. Mea culpa all of it!  If one of us two is to be blamed, it is I, at whose representation of circumstances he submitted to do violence to his own self-respect.  I would not suffer him to tell even our dear common friend Mr. Kenyon.  I felt that it would be throwing on dear Mr. Kenyon a painful responsibility, and involve him in the blame ready to fall.  And dear dear Mr. Kenyon, like the noble, generous friend I love so deservedly, comprehends all at a word, sends us not his forgiveness, but his sympathy, his