“Curses on the father, curses on the husband, who have combined to make me rue the day I was born!  The father I cannot disown, but the husband—­”

“Hush!”

It was Mr. Gilchrist who dared her fury.  Philemon said nothing.

“Hush! he may be the father of your children.  Don’t curse—­”

But she only towered the higher and her beauty, from being simply majestic, became appalling.

“Children!” she cried.  “If ever I bear children to this man, may the blight of Heaven strike them as it has struck me this day.  May they die as my hopes have died, or, if they live, may they bruise his heart as mine is bruised, and curse their father as—­”

Here I fled the house.  I was shaking as if this awful denunciation had fallen on my own head.  But before the door closed behind me, a different cry called me back.  Mr. Gilchrist was lying lifeless on the floor, and Philemon, the patient, tender Philemon, had taken Agatha to his breast and was soothing her there as if the words she had showered upon him had been blessings instead of the most fearful curses which had ever left the lips of mortal woman.

The next letter was in Agatha’s handwriting.  It was dated some months later and was stained and crumpled more than any other in the whole packet.  Could Philemon once have told why?  Were these blotted lines the result of his tears falling fast upon them, tears of forty years ago, when he and she were young and love had been, doubtful?  Was the sheet so yellowed and so seamed because it had been worn on his breast and folded and unfolded so often?  Philemon, thou art in thy grave, sleeping sweetly at last by thy deeply idolised one, but these marks of feeling still remain indissolubly connected with the words that gave them birth.

Dear philemon: 

You are gone for a day and a night only, but it seems a lengthened absence to me, meriting a little letter.  You have been so good to me, Philemon, ever since that dreadful hour following our marriage, that sometimes—­I hardly dare yet to say always—­I feel that I am beginning to love you and that God did not deal with me so harshly when He cast me into your arms.  Yesterday I tried to tell you this when you almost kissed me at parting.  But I was afraid it was a momentary sentimentality and so kept still.  But to-day such a warm well-spring of joy rises in my heart when I think that to-morrow the house will be bright again, and that in place of the empty wall opposite me at table I shall see your kindly and forbearing face, I know that the heart I had thought impregnable has begun to yield, and that daily gentleness, and a boundless consideration from one who had excuse for bitter thoughts and recrimination, are doing what all of us thought impossible a few short months ago.