pect to hear
from you before the week is over. If you bid me, I will be
with you early next week. If you tell me that my coming
will be useless,--why, then, I shall care very little what
happens.

Yours, with all the love of my heart,

WALTER MARRABLE.

Luckily for Mary she was alone when she read the letter. Her first
idea on reading it was to think of the words which she had used
when she had most ungraciously consented to become the wife of
Harry Gilmore. "Were he so placed that he could afford to marry a
poor wife, I should leave you and go to him." She remembered them
accurately. She had made up her mind at the time that she would say
them, thinking that thus he would be driven from her, and that she
would be at rest from his solicitation, from those of her friends,
and from the qualms of her own conscience. He had chosen to claim
her in spite of those words,--and now the thing had happened to
the possibility of which she had referred. Poor as she was, Walter
Marrable was able to make her his wife. She held in her hand his
letter telling her that it was so. All her heart was his,--as much
now as it had ever been; and it was impossible that she should not go
to him. She had told Mr. Gilmore herself that she could never love
again as she loved Walter Marrable. She had been driven to believe
that she could never be his wife, and she had separated herself from
him. She had separated herself from him, and persuaded herself that
it would be expedient for her to become the wife of this other man.
But up to this very moment she had never been able to overcome her
horror at the prospect. From day to day she had thought that she must
give it up, even when they were dinning into her ears the tidings
that Walter Marrable was to marry that girl at Dunripple. But that
had been a falsehood,--an absolute falsehood. There had been no such
thought in his bosom. He had never been untrue to her. Ah! how much
the nobler of the two had he been!

And yet she had struggled hard to do right,--to think of others more
than of herself;--so to dispose of herself that she might be of some
use in the world. And it had come to this! It was quite impossible
now that she should marry Harry Gilmore. There had hitherto been
at any rate an attempt on her part to reconcile herself to that
marriage; but now the attempt was impossible. What right could she
have to refuse the man she loved when he told her that all his
happiness