My love, good night. Granton will give you any further particulars. Talk to him freely--it will be his good heart's best reward. His happy, busy life, which is now begun, may have been made all the brighter for the momentary cloud which taught him that Providence oftentimes blesses us in better ways than by giving us exactly the thing we desired. He told me when we parted, which was the only allusion he made to the past--that though Mrs. Colin was "the dearest little woman in all the world," he should always adore as "something between a saint and an angel," Miss Dora. Is she my saint and angel? Perhaps--if she were not likewise the woman of my love. What is she doing now, I wonder? Probably vanishing, lamp in hand, as I have often watched her, up the stair into her own wee room--where she shuts the door and remembers me. Yes, remember me--but not with pain. Believe that I am happy--that whatever now befalls me, I shall always be happy. Tell your father--No, tell him nothing. He surely knows all. Or he will know it--when, this life having passed away like a vapour, he and I stand together before the One God--who is also the Redeemer of sinners. Write to me, but do not come and see me. Hitherto, your name has been kept clear out of everything; it must be still, at any sacrifice to both of us. I count on this from you. You know, you once said, laughing, you had already taken in your heart the marriage vow of "obedience," if I chose to exact it. I never did, but I do now. Unless I send for you--which I solemnly promise to do if illness or any other cause makes it necessary--obey me, your husband: do not come and see me. Three months will pass quickly. Then? But let us not look forward. My love, good-night. Max Urquhart. CHAPTER XII. HER STORY. |Max says I am to write an end to my journal, tie it up with his letters and mine, fasten a stone to it, and drop it over the ship's bulwarks into this blue, blue sea.--That is, either he threatened me or I him--I forget which, with such a solemn termination; but I doubt if we shall ever have courage to do it. It would feel something like dropping a little child into this "wild and wandering grave," as a poor mother on board had to do yesterday. "But I shall see him again," she sobbed, as I was helping her to sew the little white body up in its hammock. "The good God will take care of him and let me find him again, even out of the deep sea. I cannot lose him; I loved him so." And thus, I believe, no perfect love, or the record of it, in heart or in word, can ever be lost. So it is of small matter to Max and me, whether this, our true love's history, sinks down into the bottom of the ocean; to sleep there--as we almost expected we should do yesterday, there was such a storm; or is sealed up and preserved for the benefit of--of our great-grandchildren. Ah! that poor mother and her dead child!