no hope.
Her husband had let fall hints of being so deeply pledged to Dupont,
that his liberty or perhaps his life depended on his union with Mary,
and could she wish her child to live to be the wife of such a man, yet
could she see her die? What pen can describe the anguish of that fond
mother, as for weeks she watched and tended her senseless child, or the
contending feelings that wrung her heart when Mary woke again to
consciousness and misery, and asked her, in a voice almost inarticulate
from weakness, what had happened--why she was thus? Truth gradually
broke upon her mind, and Mary too soon remembered all. The physician
said she was recovering, that she would quickly be enabled to leave her
bed and go about as usual. Greville swore he would no longer be
prevented seeing her, and Mary made no opposition to his entrance.
Calmly and passively she heard all he had to say; what he told her then
she did not repeat in writing to Herbert. She merely said that she had
implored him to wait till her health was a little more restored; not to
force her to become the wife of Dupont, till she could stand _without
support_ beside the altar, and he had consented.

"Be comforted, then, my beloved Herbert," she wrote, as she concluded
this brief tale of suffering. "They buoy me up with hopes that in a very
few months I shall be as well as ever I was. I smile, for I know the
blight has fallen, and I shall never stand beside an earthly altar; all
I pray is, that death may not linger till my father's patience be
exhausted, and he vent on my poor mother all the reproaches which my
lingering illness will, I know, call forth. Oh, my beloved Herbert,
there are moments when I think the bitterness of death is passed, when I
am so calm, so happy, I feel as if I had already reached the confines of
my blissful, my eternal home; but this is not always granted me. There
are times when I can think only on the happiness I had once hoped to
share with you when heaven itself seemed dimmed by the blessedness I had
anticipated on earth. Herbert, I shall never be another's wife, and it
will not be misery to think of me in heaven. Oh, no, we shall meet there
soon, very soon, never, never more to part. Why does my pen linger?
Alas! it cannot trace the word farewell. Yet why does it so weakly
shrink? 'tis but for a brief space, and we shall meet where that word is
never heard, where sorrow and sighing shall be no more. Farewell, then,
my beloved Herbert,