of her promise, and she began again.  ’My dear Brooke.’  The letter, however, did not get itself written that night.  It was almost impossible for her to write it.  ’I think it will be better for you,’ she had tried to say, ‘to be guided by my aunt.’  But how could she say this when she did not believe it?  It was her wish to make him understand that she would never think ill of him, for a moment, if he would make up his mind to abandon her—­but she could not find the words to express herself, and she went, at last, to bed, leaving the half-covered paper upon the table.

She went to bed, and cried herself to sleep.  It had been so sweet to have a lover, a man of her own, to whom she could say what she pleased, from whom she had a right to ask for counsel and protection, a man who delighted to be near her, and to make much of her.  In comparison with her old mode of living, her old ideas of life, her life with such a lover was passed in an elysium.  She had entered from barren lands into so rich a paradise!  But there is no paradise, as she now found, without apples which must be eaten, and which lead to sorrow.  She regretted in this hour that she had ever seen Brooke Burgess.  After all, with her aunt’s love and care for her, with her mother and sister near her, with the respect of those who knew her, why should the lands have been barren, even had there been no entrance for her into that elysium?  And did it not all result in this, that the elysium to be desired should not be here; that the paradise, without the apples, must be waited for till beyond the grave?  It is when things go badly with us here, and for most of us only then, that we think that we can see through the dark clouds into the joys of heaven.  But at last she slept, and in her dreams Brooke was sitting with her in Niddon Park with his arm tight clasped round her waist.

She slept so soundly, that when a step crept silently into her room, and when a light was held for awhile over her face, neither the step nor the light awakened her.  She was lying with her head back upon the pillow, and her arm hung by the bedside, and her lips were open, and her loose hair was spread upon the pillow.  The person who stood there with the light thought that there never had been a fairer sight.  Everything there was so pure, so sweet, so good!  She was one whose only selfish happiness could come to her from the belief that others loved her.  The step had been very soft, and even the breath of the intruder was not allowed to pass heavily into the air, but the light of the candle shone upon the eyelids of the sleeper, and she moved her head restlessly on the pillow.  ’Dorothy, are you awake?  Can you speak to me?’

Then the disturbed girl gradually opened her eyes and gazed upwards, and raised herself in her bed, and sat wondering.  ’Is anything the matter, aunt?’ she said.

’Only the vagaries of an old woman, my pet, of an old woman who cannot sleep in her bed.’