how sad that such scenes should be so rare and so
short-lived!

"Hark--tirra-la-lirra-lirra!" said Wildney; "there goes the postman's
horn! Shall I run and get the letter-bag as he passes the gate?"

"Yes, do," they all cried; and the boy bounded off full of fun, greeting
the postman with such a burst of merry apostrophe, that the man shook
with laughing at him.

"Here it is at last," said Wildney. "Now, then, for the key. Here's a
letter for me, hurrah!--two for you, Miss Trevor--_what_ people you
young ladies are for writing to each other! None for you, Monty--Oh,
yes! I'm wrong, here's one; but none for Eric."

"I expected none," said Eric sighing; but his eye was fixed earnestly
on one of Mrs. Trevor's letters. He saw that it was from India, and
directed in his father's hand.

Mrs. Trevor caught his look. "Shall I read it aloud to you, dear I Do
you think you can stand it? Remember it will be in answer to ours,
telling them of--"

"Oh, yes, yes," he said, eagerly, "do let me hear it."

With instinctive delicacy Montagu and Wildney rose, but Eric pressed
them to stay. "It will help me to bear what mother says, if I see you by
me," he pleaded.

God forbid that I should transcribe that letter. It was written from the
depths of such sorrow as He only can fully sympathise with, who for
thirty years pitched his tent in the valley of human misery. By the
former mail Mrs. Williams had heard of Verny's melancholy death; by the
next she had been told that her only other child, Eric, was not dead
indeed, but a wandering outcast, marked with the brand of terrible
suspicion. Let her agony be sacred; it was God who sent it, and he only
enabled her to endure it. With bent head, and streaming eyes, and a
breast that heaved involuntarily with fitful sobs, Eric listened as
though to his mother's voice, and only now and then he murmured low to
himself, "O mother, mother, mother--but I am forgiven now. O mother, God
and man have forgiven me, and we shall be at peace again once more."

Mrs. Trevor's eyes grew too dim with weeping, to read it all, and Fanny
finished it. "Here is a little note from your father, Eric, which
dropped out when we opened dear aunt's letter. Shall I read it, too?"

"Perhaps not now, love," said Mrs. Trevor. "Poor Eric is too tired and
excited already."

"Well, then, let me glance it myself, aunty," he said. He opened it,
read a line or two, and then, with a scream, fell back swooning, while
it dro