d a small writing-desk, which had
long been used as a receptacle for old letters and accounts.

To tell the truth, the interior of the desk did not present a very
orderly arrangement. Cards of address, bills paid and unpaid, copies of
verses, and papers of many descriptions, were huddled together, and it
was not by any means surprising that Lady Lucy failed in her search for
the original account, by which to rectify the error in her shoemaker's
bill. In the hurry and nervous trepidation which had latterly become
almost a constitutional ailment with her, she turned out the contents of
the writing-desk into an easy chair, and then kneeling before it, she set
herself to the task of carefully examining the papers. Soon she came to
one letter which had been little expected in that place, and which still
bore the marks of a rose, whose withered leaves also remained, that had
been put away in its folds. The rose Walter Ferrars had given her on the
eve of their marriage, and the letter was in his handwriting, and bore
but a few days earlier date. With quickened pulses she opened the
envelope; and though a mist rose before her eyes, it seemed to form into
a mirror in which she saw the by-gone hours. And so she read--and read.

It is the fashion to laugh at love-letters, perhaps because only the
silly ones come to light. With the noblest of both sexes such effusions
are sacred, and would be profaned by the perusal of a third person: but
when a warm and true heart is joined to a manly intellect; when reason
sanctions and constancy maintains the choice which has been made, there
is little doubt but much of simple, truthful, touching eloquence is often
to be found in a "lover's" letter. That which the wife now perused with
strange and mingled feelings was evidently a reply to some girlish
depreciation of herself, and contained these words:--

"You tell me that in the scanty years of your past life, you already look
back on a hundred follies, and that you have unnumbered faults of
character at which I do not even guess. Making some allowance for a
figurative expression, I will answer 'it may be so.' What then? I have
never called you an angel, and never desired you to be perfect. The
weaknesses which cling, tendril-like, to a fine nature, not unfrequently
bind us to it by ties we do not seek to sever. I know you for a
true-hearted girl, but with the bitter lessons of life still unlearned;
let it be my part to shield you from their s