hen I read those words. I thought I knew how dearly I loved him: I had
never known it till that moment.

My mother-in-law put her arm round me, and held me to her tenderly. She
knew me well enough not to speak to me at that moment.

I rallied my courage, and pointed to the last sentence in the telegram.

"Do you mean to wait?" I asked.

"Not a day!" she answered. "I am going to the Foreign Office about my
passport--I have some interest there: they can give me letters; they can
advise and assist me. I leave to-night by the mail train to Calais."

"_You_ leave?" I said. "Do you suppose I will let you go without me? Get
my passport when you get yours. At seven this evening I will be at your
house."

She attempted to remonstrate; she spoke of the perils of the journey.
At the first words I stopped her. "Don't you know yet, mother, how
obstinate I am? They may keep you waiting at the Foreign Office. Why do
you waste the precious hours here?"

She yielded with a gentleness that was not in her everyday character.
"Will my poor Eustace ever know what a wife he has got?" That was all
she said. She kissed me, and went away in her carriage.

My remembrances of our journey are strangely vague and imperfect.

As I try to recall them, the memory of those more recent and more
interesting events which occurred after my return to England gets
between me and my adventures in Spain, and seems to force these last
into a shadowy background, until they look like adventures that happened
many years since. I confusedly recollect delays and alarms that tried
our patience and our courage. I remember our finding friends (thanks to
our letters of recommendation) in a Secretary to the Embassy and in a
Queen's Messenger, who assisted and protected us at a critical point in
the journey. I recall to mind a long succession of men in our employment
as travelers, all equally remarkable for their dirty cloaks and their
clean linen, for their highly civilized courtesy to women and their
utterly barbarous cruelty to horses. Last, and most important of all, I
see again, more clearly than I can see anything else, the one wretched
bedroom of a squalid village inn in which we found our poor darling,
prostrate between life and death, insensible to everything that passed
in the narrow little world that lay around his bedside.

There was nothing romantic or interesting in the accident which had put
my husband's life in peril.

He had ventured too near