’I write to you for the last time, lest you should consider yourself any longer bound by the engagements which must long have been distasteful.  When I say that Mr. Ford has for some months been my colleague, you will know to what I allude, without my expressing any further.  I am already embarked for the U. S. My enemies have succeeded in destroying my character and blighting my hopes.  I am at present a fugitive from the hands of so-called justice; but I could have borne all with a cheerful heart if you had not played me false.  You will never hear more of one who loved you faithfully.

‘TH.  MADISON.’

Poor Charlotte!  The wound was a great deal too deep for her usual childish tears, or even for a single word.  She stood still, cold, and almost unconscious till she heard a step, then she put the cruel letter away in her bosom, and went about her work as usual.

They thought her looking very pale, and Jane now and then reproached her with eating no more than a sparrow, and told her she was getting into a dwining way; but she made no answer, except that she ’could do her work.’  At last, one Sunday evening, when she had been left alone with the children, her mistress found her sitting at the foot of her bed, among the sleeping little ones, weeping bitterly but silently.  Isabel’s kindness at length opened her heart, and she put the letter into her hand.  Poor little thing, it was very meekly borne:  ’Please don’t tell no one, ma’am,’ she said; ‘I couldn’t hear him blamed!’

’But what does he mean?  He must be under some terrible error.  Who is this Ford?’

’It is Delaford, ma’am, I make no doubt, though however he could have got there!  And, oh dear me! if I had only told poor Tom the whole, that I was a silly girl, and liked his flatteries now and then, but constant in my heart I always was!’

Isabel could not but suppose that Delaford, if it were he, might have exaggerated poor Charlotte’s little flirtation; but there was small comfort here, since contradiction was impossible.  The U. S., over which the poor child had puzzled in vain, was no field in which to follow him up—­he had not even dated his letter; and it was a very, very faint hope that Lord Fitzjocelyn might trace him out, especially as he had evidently fled in disgrace; and poor Charlotte sobbed bitterly over his troubles, as well as her own.

She was better after she had told her mistress, though still she shrank from any other sympathy.  Even Jane’s pity would have been too much for her, and her tender nature was afraid of the tongues that would have discussed her grief.  Perhaps the high-toned nature of Isabel was the very best to be brought into contact with the poor girl’s spirit, which was of the same order, and many an evening did Isabel sit in the twilight, beside the children’s beds, talking to her, or sometimes reading a few lines to show her how others had suffered in the same way.