For the rest, the pleasantness is not on every side.  It seemed to me right, notwithstanding that dear Mr. Kenyon advised against it, to apprise my father of my being in England.  I could not leave England without trying the possibility of his seeing me once, of his consenting to kiss my child once.  So I wrote, and Robert wrote.  A manly, true, straightforward letter his was, yet in some parts so touching to me and so generous and conciliating everywhere, that I could scarcely believe in the probability of its being read in vain.  In reply he had a very violent and unsparing letter, with all the letters I had written to papa through these five years sent back unopened, the seals unbroken.  What went most to my heart was that some of the seals were black with black-edged envelopes; so that he might have thought my child or husband dead, yet never cared to solve the doubt by breaking the seal.  He said he regretted to have been forced to keep them by him until now, through his ignorance of where he should send them.  So there’s the end.  I cannot, of course, write again.  God takes it all into His own hands, and I wait.

We go on Tuesday.  If I do not see you (as I scarcely hope to do now), it will be only a gladness delayed for a few months.  We shall meet in Paris if we live.  May God bless you both, dearest friends!  I think of you and love you.  Dear Mr. Martin, don’t stay too late in England this year, for the climate seems to me worse than ever.  Not that I have much cough now—­I am much better—­but the quality of the atmosphere is unmistakable to my lungs and air passages, and I believe it will be wise, on this account, to go away quickly.

Your ever affectionate and grateful
BA.

* * * * *

To Miss E.F.  Haworth[2]

London:  September 24, 1851.

My dear Miss Haworth,—­I do hope you have not set us quite on the outside of your heart with the unfeeling and ungrateful.  I say ‘us’ when I ought to have said ‘me,’ for you have known Robert, and you have not known me, and I am naturally less safe with you than he is—­less safe in your esteem.  We should both have gone to inquire after your health if he had not been attacked with influenza, and unfit for anything until the days you mentioned as the probable term of your remaining in town had passed.  I waited till he should be better, and the malady lingered.  Now he is well, and I do hope you may be so too.  May it be!  Bear us in mind and love, for we go away to-morrow to Paris—­where, however, we shall expect you before long.  Thank you, thank you, for the books.  I have been struck and charmed with some things in the ’Companion’—­especially, may I say, with the ‘Modern Pygmalion,’ which catches me on my weak side of the love of wonder.  By the way, what am I to say of Swedenborg and mesmerism?  So much I could—­the books have so drawn and held me (as far as I was capable of being drawn or held, in this chaos of London)—­that I will not speak at all.  The note-page is too small—­the haste I write in, too great.