could sway me to such a course with regard to the woman I
loved and had openly declared my plighted wife. You will understand all
this and make allowance for me. Write to me immediately, and relieve, if
possible, my intense solicitude. At all events, let me know the truth,
and look it in the face as soon as may be. Any reality is better than
suspense. Yet I must 'hope against hope,' or surrender wholly. I have
not time to write another line. My business is imperative, or I should
certainly retrace my steps.

"Yours eternally, Wentworth."

The man who wrote this letter was capable of condensing in a few calm
words a world of passion, whether he spoke or wrote them; but he had
governed his pen carefully in his agonizing uncertainty. It was yet to
be determined when he penned these lines whether he should be
considered a lover addressing his mistress, or an uncle writing to his
niece, and in this bitter perplexity he commanded his inclinations to
the side of principle.

I wept with tears of joy and thankfulness above this constrained
epistle--I pressed it to my heart, my lips, a thousand times, in the
quiet hours of night, in the moments of retirement my jailer granted me.
The child Ernie alone saw and wondered at these manifestations of which
I first saw the extravagance through his solemn imitations thereof,
which yet made me catch him rapturously in my arms and kiss him a
thousand times, until he put me aside, at last, with decorous dignity,
as one transcending privilege.

By some vicarious process, best understood by lovers, I lavished on
little Ernie a thousand terms of endearment, meant only for another, and
by the light of my own happiness he seemed transfigured. He was
identified with the lifting away of a burden more bitter than captivity
itself. They could but kill my body now--my soul was filled with a new
life that nothing could extinguish; and believing in Wentworth, I felt
that I could die happy, let death come when and how it would. I knew now
that in the course of time, whether I lived or died, Wentworth would
know that I was not his niece, and claim Mabel as his own, remembering
my estimate of those who held her in charge. Then would the tide of love
and passion, so long repressed, roll back in its old channel, and he
would leave no stone unturned, no path unexplored, whereby to trace my
fate.

To this, as yet, he held no clew. The sea had seemed to swallow Miriam
Harz, by which name I had been regi