When at last we turned him round for inspection, smooth-haired and stiff with the consciousness of his respectability, I could have wept at my own handiwork.

“You poor dear!” I cried.  “Oh, Jane, doesn’t he look horrible!”

But Gabriel went into the parlour to look at himself in the mirror, and declared that he pleased himself mightily.

The visit itself was comparatively uneventful.  They have asked us to dine next Friday, but I doubt whether we shall go.  Gabriel suggests that we should get married at once and fly from such terrors.

Good-bye now, my sweet one.

Yours more than ever, in spite of all,

Emilia.

LETTER XXXII.

Graysmill, March 3d.

I don’t know how it comes, but it is a positive effort to me to write a letter, even to you.  If I had not been reminded by the calendar that a new month is already on the growth, I should not perhaps have written to-day.

There is nothing to tell you, I am too happy; and how it comes I know not, but joy is difficult to express.  Perhaps because it is so rare that we have hardly learned its language.

And yet, how soon one gets accustomed to the greatest marvels!  At first, I was filled with doubt and wonder at the miracle that had transformed me; now, I take it all as a matter of course.  That’s the worst of it; a clay-fed mortal is lifted to Elysium and forgets at the end of a week that he ever tasted coarser food than ambrosia!  I am spoilt for life; if ever any grief falls upon me in the future, I shall be beaten to earth.

The other night, as I lay in bed, there came to me, for the first time in my remembrance, that horror of death of which you sometimes spoke to me.  I thought to myself:  I shall lie thus in the dark, only this heart will be still, this blood will be cold, and there will be no dawn for me,—­yet the world will spin on as before, and those who loved me will smile again.  I feared death for the first time, because, for the first time, life is dear to me.  It is the outcome of my great content; I cling to my happiness, and Death is my only enemy, the only power that could knock this cup of bliss out of my hands.  Oh, Constance, to die before one has drunk that full measure, how horrible!

Another shadow there is that flits from time to time across my eyes.  Why, if such content can be, is it not universal?  Why is not every face I meet stamped with a similar joy?  I lay awake long last night, thinking of you.  I do not look upon you as actually unhappy, that is not in your nature, you sunbeam, yet you lack in your dear life the best light, that of another’s shedding.  Now that I know what it is to be loved, I look upon the blankness of your existence with dismay.

No more to-day, but I shall write again soon, I promise.

Yours ever and always,
Emilia.