“Are you sure it was from him?”

“No; I have not spoken to her.  I will go up to her now.  Don’t you come, Bell.  Oh!  Bell, do not look so unhappy.”  She then went over and kissed her sister, and after that, with very gentle steps, made her way up to her mother’s room.  “Mamma, may I come in?” she said.

“Oh! my child!”

“I know it is from him, mamma.  Tell me all at once.”

Mrs Dale had read the letter.  With quick, glancing eyes, she had made herself mistress of its whole contents, and was already aware of the nature and extent of the sorrow which had come upon them.  It was a sorrow that admitted of no hope.  The man who had written that letter could never return again; nor if he should return could he be welcomed back to them.  The blow had fallen, and it was to be borne.  Inside the letter to herself had been a very small note addressed to Lily.  “Give her the enclosed,” Crosbie had said in his letter, “if you do not now think it wrong to do so.  I have left it open, that you may read it.”  Mrs Dale, however, had not yet read it, and she now concealed it beneath her handkerchief.

I will not repeat at length Crosbie’s letter to Mrs Dale.  It covered four sides of letter-paper, and was such a letter that any man who wrote it must have felt himself to be a rascal.  We saw that he had difficulty in writing it, but the miracle was, that any man could have found it possible to write it.  “I know you will curse me,” said he; “and I deserve to be cursed.  I know that I shall be punished for this, and I must bear my punishment.  My worst punishment will be this, that I never more shall hold up my head again.”  And then, again, he said:—­“My only excuse is my conviction that I should never make her happy.  She has been brought up as an angel, with pure thoughts, with holy hopes, with a belief in all that is good, and high, and noble.  I have been surrounded through my whole life by things low, and mean, and ignoble.  How could I live with her, or she with me?  I know now that this is so; but my fault has been that I did not know it when I was there with her.  I choose to tell you all,” he continued, towards the end of the letter, “and therefore I let you know that I have engaged myself to marry another woman.  Ah!  I can foresee how bitter will be your feelings when you read this:  but they will not be so bitter as mine while I write it.  Yes; I am already engaged to one who will suit me, and whom I may suit.  You will not expect me to speak ill of her who is to be near and dear to me.  But she is one with whom I may mate myself without an inward conviction that I shall destroy all her happiness by doing so.  Lilian,” he said, “shall always have my prayers; and I trust that she may soon forget, in the love of an honest man, that she ever knew one so dishonest as—­Adolphus Crosbie.”