ing came below the blot, and went on unbroken.

"My little one is gone and I am left lonely oh so lonely. I cannot but
think that if you had loved me as you once did I should yet be clasping
my little one to my bosom and you would have a daughter to comfort you
after I am gone. I feel sure I cannot long survive this--ah there my
hand has burst out bleeding again, but do not think I mind it, I know
it was only an accident, you never meant to do it, though you teased me
by refusing to say so--besides it is nothing. You might draw ever drop
of blood from my body and I would not care if only you would not make
my heart bleed so. Oh, it is gone all over my paper and you will think
I have done it to let you see how it bleeds--but I cannot write it all
over again it is too great a labour and too painful to write, so you
must see it just as it is. I dare not think where my baby is, for if I
should be doomed never to see her because of the love I have borne to
you and consented to be as you wished if I am cast out from God because
I loved you more than him I shall never see you again--for to be where
I could see you would never be punishment enough for my sins."

Here the writing stopped: the bleeding of the hand had probably brought
it to a close. The letter had never been folded, but lying there, had
lain there. He looked if he could find a date; there was none. He held
the sheet up to the light, and saw a paper mark; while close by lay
another sheet with merely a date--in the same hand, as if the writer
had been about to commence another in lieu of the letter spoiled.

"Strange!" thought Donal with himself; "an old withered grief looks
almost as pitiful as an old withered joy!--But who is to say either is
withered? Those who look upon death as an evil, yet regard it as the
healer of sorrows! Is it such? No one can tell how long a grief may
last unwithered! Surely till the life heals it! He is a coward who
would be cured of his sorrow by mere lapse of time, by the mere
forgetting of a brain that grows musty with age. It is God alone who
can heal--the God of the dead and of the living! and the dead must find
him, or be miserable for evermore!"

He had not a doubt that the letter he had read was in the writing of
the mother of the present earl's children.

What was he to do? He had thought he was looking into matters much
older--things over which the permission of lady Arctura extended; and
in truth what he had discovered, o