In regard to the surviving persons with whom this narrative associates me, I have little to say which it can concern the reader to know.  The man whom I have presented in the preceding pages under the name of Sherwin is, I believe, still alive, and still residing in France—­whither he retreated soon after the date of the last events mentioned in my autobiography.  A new system had been introduced into his business by his assistant, which, when left to his own unaided resources, he failed to carry out.  His affairs became involved; a commercial crisis occurred, which he was wholly unable to meet; and he was made a bankrupt, having first dishonestly secured to himself a subsistence for life, out of the wreck of his property.  I accidentally heard of him, a few years since, as maintaining among the English residents of the town he then inhabited, the character of a man who had undeservedly suffered from severe family misfortunes, and who bore his afflictions with the most exemplary piety and resignation.

To those once connected with him, who are now no more, I need not and cannot refer again.  That part of the dreary Past with which they are associated, is the part which I still shrink in terror from thinking on.  There are two names which my lips have not uttered for years; which, in this life, I shall never pronounce again.  The night of Death is over them:  a night to look away from for evermore.

To look away from—­but, towards what object?  The Future?  That way, I see but dimly even yet.  It is on the Present that my thoughts are fixed, in the contentment which desires no change.

For the last five months I have lived here with Clara—­here, on the little estate which was once her mother’s, which is now hers.  Long before my father’s death we often talked, in the great country house, of future days which we might pass together, as we pass them now, in this place.  Though we may often leave it for a time, we shall always look back to Lanreath Cottage as to our home.  The years of retirement which I spent at the Hall, after my recovery, have not awakened in me a single longing to return to the busy world.  Ralph—­now the head of our family; now aroused by his new duties to a sense of his new position—­Ralph, already emancipated from many of the habits which once enthralled and degraded him, has written, bidding me employ to the utmost the resources which his position enables him to offer me, if I decide on entering into public life.  But I have no such purpose; I am still resolved to live on in obscurity, in retirement, in peace.  I have suffered too much; I have been wounded too sadly, to range myself with the heroes of Ambition, and fight my way upward from the ranks.  The glory and the glitter which I once longed to look on as my own, would dazzle and destroy me, now.  Such shocks as I have endured, leave that behind them which changes the character and the purpose of a life.  The mountain-path of Action is no longer a path for me; my future hope pauses with my present happiness in the shadowed valley of Repose.