You never do. I can see how you carry me in your heart continually; and how you are for ever considering how you can help me and mine. And if it were not become so natural to feel this, so sweet to depend upon you, and accept everything from you without even saying "thank you," I might begin to express "gratitude;" but the word would make you smile. I amused you once, I remember, by an indignant disclaimer of obligations between such as ourselves; how everything given and received ought to be free as air, and how you ought to take me as readily if I were heiress to ten thousand a-year, as I would you if you were the Duke of Northumberland. No, Max; those are not these sort of things that give me, towards you, the feeling of "gratitude,"--it is the goodness, the thoughtfulness, the tender love and care. I don't mean to insult your sex by saying no man ever loved like you; but few men love in that special way, which alone could have satisfied a restless, irritable girl like me, who finds in you perfect trust and perfect rest. If not allowed to be grateful on my own account, I may be in behalf of my sister Penelope. After thus long following out your orders, medical and mental, I begin to notice a slight change in Penelope. She no longer lies in bed late, on the plea that it shortens the day; nor is she so difficult to persuade in going out. Further than the garden she will not stir; but there I get her to creep up and down for a little while daily. Lately, she has began to notice her flowers, especially a white moss-rose, which she took great pride in, and which never flowered until this summer. Yesterday, its first bud opened,--she stopped and examined it. "Somebody has been mindful of this--who was it?" I said, the gardener and myself together. "Thank you." She called John--showed him what a good bloom it was, and consulted how they should manage to get the plant to flower again next year. She can then look forward to "next year." You say, that as "while there is life there is hope," with the body; so, while one ray of hope is discernible, the soul is alive. To save souls alive, that is your special calling. It seems as if you yourself had been led through deep waters of despair, in order that you might personally understand how those feel who are drowning, and therefore know best how to help them. And lately, you have in this way done more than you know of. Shall I tell you? You will not be displeased. Max--hitherto, nobody but me has seen a line of your letters. I could not bear it. I am as jealous over them as any old miser; it has vexed me even to see a stray hand fingering them, before they reach mine. Yet, this week I actually read out loud two pages of one of them to Penelope! This was how it came about.