“I have, however, another suggestion to make, which is of a positive nature, and which I am sure will meet with your approval.  It is, that her parents, or some of her other relations, if her parents are not alive, should be informed of her situation.  Possibly, you may know something of her connections, and can therefore do this good office.  She is dying in a strange place, among people who avoid her as they would avoid a pestilence.  Even though it be only to bury her, some relation ought to be immediately summoned to her bed-side.

“I shall visit her twice to-morrow, in the morning and at night.  If you are not willing to risk seeing her (and I repeat that it is in no sense imperative that you should combat such unwillingness), perhaps you will communicate with me at my private address.

“I remain, dear Sir,
“Faithfully yours,
                                  “JOHN BERNARD.

“P.  S.—­I open my letter again, to inform you that Turner, acting against all advice, has left the hospital to-day.  He attempted to go on Tuesday last, when, I believe, he first received information of the young woman’s serious illness, but was seized with a violent attack of giddiness, on attempting to walk, and fell down just outside the door of the ward.  On this second occasion, however, he has succeeded in getting away without any accident—­as far, at least, as the persons employed about the hospital can tell.”

When the letter fell from my trembling hand, when I first asked of my own heart the fearful question:—­“Have I, to whom the mere thought of ever seeing this woman again has been as a pollution to shrink from, the strength to stand by her death-bed, the courage to see her die?”—­then, and not till then, did I really know how suffering had fortified, while it had humbled me; how affliction has the power to purify, as well as to pain.

All bitter memory of the ill that she had done me, of the misery I had suffered at her hands, lost its hold on my mind.  Once more, her mother’s last words of earthly lament—­“Oh, who will pray for her when I am gone!” seemed to be murmuring in my ear—­murmuring in harmony with the divine words in which the Voice from the Mount of Olives taught forgiveness of injuries to all mankind.

She was dying:  dying among strangers in the pining madness of fever—­and the one being of all who knew her, whose presence at her bedside might yet bring calmness to her last moments, and give her quietly and tenderly to death, was the man whom she had pitilessly deceived and dishonoured, whose youth she had ruined, whose hopes she had wrecked for ever.  Strangely had destiny brought us together—­terribly had it separated us—­awfully would it now unite us again, at the end!