There was no one to whom she could go for advice or sympathy. Mrs. Gordon was in Scotland, where her husband had an estate, and she had no other intimate friend. But at the worst, it was only another year and then she would be her own mistress and Ernest Medway would come and marry her. Of this result she never had one doubt. True, she heard very little from him; but if not one word had come to assure her she would still have been confident that he would keep his word, if alive to do so. Letter-writing was not then the easily practised relief it is now, and she knew Lord Medway disliked it. Yet she was not without even these evidences of his remembrance, and considering the conditions of the country in which they had been written, the great distance between them, the difficulty of getting letters to New York and the uncertainty of getting letters from New York to England, these evidences of his affection had been fairly numerous. All of them had come enclosed in her Uncle Neil's letters, and without mention or explanation, for Neil was sympathetically cautious and did not know what effect they might have on the life of Maria, though he did not know _his_ letters were sure to be inquired after and read by her parents. They were intensely symbolic of a man who preferred to _do_ rather than to _say_, and are fairly represented by the three quoted: * * * * * "SWEETEST MARIA: Have you forgiven your adoring lover? ERNEST." * * * * * "MY LITTLE DARLING: I have been wounded. I have been ill with fever; but no pain is like the pain of living away from you. ERNEST." * * * * * "STAR OF MY LIFE: I have counted the days until the twenty-fifth of November; they are two hundred and fifty-five. Every day I come nearer to you, my adorable Maria. ERNEST." * * * * * This last letter was dated March the fourteenth, and with it lying next her heart, was it likely she would consent to or even be compelled to marry Richard Spencer? She smiled a positive denial of such a supposition. But for all that, the preparations went on with a stubborn persistence that would have dismayed a weaker spirit. The plans for furnishing the Spencer house, the patterns of the table silver, all the little items of the new life proposed for her were as a matter of duty submitted to her taste or judgment. She was always stolidly indifferent, and her answer was invariably the same, "I do not care. It is nothing to me." Then Mr. Semple would answer with cold authority, "You have excellent taste, Elizabeth. Make the selection you think best for Maria."