"Yes," she replied calmly; "I am never tortured by any fears about those I love now; the time was when I was first very, very happy; when the wonderful, glorious sense of the life that had opened to me came upon me fully; when I hardly dared to recognise it, because of the shadow of death. Then it hung over my husband and my child; over my father--and--you." He shook his head with an involuntary deprecatory movement, and a momentary flicker of pain disturbed his grave thoughtful eyes. "And it lent an intensity which sometimes I could hardly bear to every hour of my life--my wonderfully happy life," she repeated, and looked all around her in a loving solemn way which struck the listener to the heart. "But then the thing I had dreaded, though I had never divined its form, though it had gradually faded from my mind, came upon me--you know how, James, and how rebellious I was under my trial; no one knows but God and you--and then, then the shadow was lightened. It never has fallen again over them or you; it hangs only over me, and--James, look at me, don't turn away--I want to remember every look in your face to-day; it is not a shadow at all, but only a veil before the light whose glory I could not bear yet awhile. That is all, indeed." He did not speak, and she felt that a sharp thrill of pain ran through his spare form. "Don't be angry with me," she went on in soft pleading tones, "don't think I distress you needlessly, I do so want you to hear me--to leave what I am saying to you in your mind. When I first told you that I had a presentiment that I had suffered my last sorrow, that all was to be peace for me henceforth, except in thinking of my child, you were not persuaded; you imputed it to the shock my nerves had received, and you think so still. It is not so indeed, even with respect to my child. I am tranquil and happy now; I don't know why, I cannot account for it. Nothing in the circumstances is susceptible of change, and I see those circumstances as clearly as I saw them when they first existed; but I am changed. I feel as if my vision had been enlarged; I feel as if the horizon had widened before me, and with the great space has come great calm--calm of mind--like what travellers tell us comes with the immense mountain solitudes, when all the world beneath looks little, and yet the great loneliness lifts one up nearer to heaven, and has no fear or trembling in it. I am ne her God not unquiet now, James, not even for the child. The wrong that I have done her God will right." James Dugdale said hastily, "You have done her no conscious wrong, and all will be righted." "Yes, I know; I am saying so; but not in our way, James, not as we--" she paused a very little, almost imperceptibly--"not as you would have it. But that it will be righted I have not the smallest doubt, not the least fear. You will remember, James, that I said to you the wrong I did my child will be righted."