Though I now think, and you will probably think so too, that this letter was written full as much from the head as from the heart, you will not wonder that it bent me to the earth in agony; and that when my mother entered the hall on her return, she heard my voice uttering the tones of loud lamentation, and found me in the arms of the terrified servants. Never have I since suffered myself to be so weakly overpowered. I try to excuse such weakness by the state of my health at the time. Indisposition, and a tendency to a severe feverish cold, had prevented me from accompanying my mother and De Walden. Nor did the sudden surprise of seeing Pendarves steady my nerves, or decrease my fever; but these circumstances prepared the way for the letter to affect me as it did, and to excuse in some measure the state in which my mother beheld me. An open letter near me, in the hand-writing of Pendarves, accounted for all that she saw. I was become more composed, though I did not speak, and she then eagerly inquired, but she soon desisted, to express her surprise at the charge of having gone out purposely to avoid him; for no such letter had ever reached her: in consequence of some accident it did not arrive till the next day. She declared she could not sleep till she had written to Seymour to exonerate herself from so heavy a charge. I wished to say, "and to assure him, I hope, that I am not engaged to De Walden, that, on the contrary, he is not even a declared lover:" but I _dared_ not say this; and my mother read on--but she read hastily, and wished, I saw, to conceal from me the painful emotions which the letter occasioned her. She therefore insisted on my forgetting these ill-founded reproaches, as she called them; she then left me, to write to Seymour. The next morning Seymour's servant came to say, he was going to rejoin his master, and wished to know if we had any commands for him. To him, therefore, was consigned the exculpatory letter. But of this I had no knowledge at the time; for when my mother and the servant entered the room next day, they found me in all the restlessness of fast-increasing illness, and my mother, before night, was assured by the medical attendants, that I was suffering under a very formidable attack of the scarlet fever. For three days and nights my life was despaired of; and as, according to the merciful dispensations of Providence, "good always springs from evil," my mother learnt to know, from the danger of her only child, that life was not so valueless to her, as she was sometimes disposed to think it. But hope succeeding to fear, on the fourth morning from my seizure I was pronounced out of danger. Yet a cloud, and that a dark one, still hung over my mother's prospects; for I had named Seymour in my delirium, in such terms as convinced her that he was ever uppermost in my mind, and that my illness had been the consequence of misery endured on his account.