could have done
it.

It made him stronger, much stronger, to bear the bitter trouble that yet
oppressed him day by day. It made him hope on, even in the dark. It
gave him an object in life, when all he once had lived for seemed swept
away.

The reality of his belief was before long put to a very severe test. A
letter from his mother arrived one day. The unusually shaky hand-writing
of the address instantly struck him, and a horrible dread that something
was wrong seized him. It might have turned out nothing after all, for
where we remember one presentiment that turns out true, we forget twenty
that turn out false. But in this case it possessed him. He had been
very far from well for some time past. In fact, the three years of
prison life, and its attendant anxieties, were telling on him. He was
lying on a sofa, which his friend at the farm had sent to the prison for
him, when the letter was put in his hand. "I cannot read this here," he
muttered, and hurried out of the room, and thence into the road. Taking
the way towards Yaxley, he almost ran down a lane that turned towards
Whittlesea mere to a favourite spot by the water, where he had often gone
fishing with Cosin (for it was deep there), and was very secluded. He
called it his _sanctuaire_. Flinging himself down, he tore open the
letter with trembling hands, and began to read:--

"Oh, my dear, dear son! How can I write what I have to say to you? The
good God give you strength to bear it like a man. Elise has run away
from her home. Your friend, Colonel Fontenoy, has been staying in our
neighbourhood, having recovered from his wounds: and made love to her in
spite of the opposition of her family (you know what a handsome man he
is), and by this time they are married in Paris . . ."

Whether Tournier got as far as this, no one could say. He was found some
hours after with the letter crumpled up in his hand, lying lifeless on
the green turf.

But what had been going on during the interval between his beginning the
letter and his swooning away? One thing was most certain: The footsteps
leading to the brink of the water, again and again repeated, were signs
of an awful struggle between the impulse to get free from the troubles of
this life (though not of the next), and the determination to trust in God
and do the right.

His fellow-prisoners had noticed his agitated manner and hasty departure
after receiving the letter, and when he did not retu