ked at once. She felt
that a moment was come when she must be resolute, or lose her hold on
life.

"Cousin Godfrey," she said, in a tone he scarcely recognized as
hers--it frightened him as if it came from a sepulchre--"if you do not
take that purse away, I will throw it in the fire without opening it!
If my husband can not give me enough to eat, I can starve as well as
another. If you loved Tom, it would be different, but you hate him, and
I will have nothing from you. Take it away, Cousin Godfrey."

Mortified, hurt, miserable, Godfrey took the purse, and, without a
word, walked from the room. Somewhere down in his secret heart was
dawning an idea of Letty beyond anything he used to think of her, but
in the mean time he was only blindly aware that his heart had been shot
through and through. Nor was this the time for him to reflect that,
under his training, Letty, even if he had married her, would never have
grown to such dignity.

It was, indeed, only in that moment she had become capable of the
action. She had been growing as none, not Mary, still less herself,
knew, under the heavy snows of affliction, and this was her first
blossom. Not many of my readers will mistake me, I trust. Had it been
in Letty pride that refused help from such an old friend, that pride I
should count no blossom, but one of the meanest rags that ever
fluttered to scare the birds. But the dignity of her refusal was in
this--that she would accept nothing in which her husband had and could
have no human, that is, no spiritual share. She had married him because
she loved him, and she would hold by him wherever that might lead her:
not wittingly would she allow the finest edge, even of ancient
kindness, to come between her Tom and herself! To accept from her
cousin Godfrey the help her husband ought to provide her, would be to
let him, however innocently, step into his place! There was no
reasoning in her resolve: it was allied to that spiritual insight
which, in simple natures, and in proportion to their simplicity,
approaches or amounts to prophecy. As the presence of death will
sometimes change even an ordinary man to a prophet, in times of sore
need the childlike nature may well receive a vision sufficing to direct
the doubtful step. Letty felt that the taking of that money would be
the opening of a gulf to divide her and Tom for ever.

The moment Godfrey was out of the room she cast herself on the floor,
and sobbed as if her heart must