The return post brought him a letter from Ellen. Rather to his consternation. Ellen assumed--not unnaturally, as the reader will find--that the sole cause of his mysterious absence was illness; that he had been ill from the first, and unable to travel. It ran as follows:-- "My Dearest Arthur, "I cannot express to you what my feelings are this morning; so full of joy, yet full of pain. Oh I cannot tell you what the past two or three weeks have been to me; looking back, it almost seems a wonder that I _lived_ through them. For I thought--I will not say here what I thought, and perhaps I could not say, only that you were never coming again; and that it was agony to me, worse than death. And to hear now that you could not come: that the cause of your silence and absence has been dangerous illness, brings to me a great sorrow and shame. Oh Arthur, my dearest, forgive me! Forgive also my writing to you thus freely; but it almost seems to me as though you were already my husband. Had you been called away only half-an-hour later you would have been, and perhaps even might have had me with you in your illness. "I should like to write pages and pages, but you may be too ill yet to read very much, and so I will say no more. May God watch over you and bring you to health again. "Ever yours, Arthur, yours only, with the great love of my heart, "Ellen Adair." And Captain Arthur Bohun, in spite of the cruel fate that had parted them, pressed the letter to his heart, and the sweet name, Ellen Adair--sweeter than any he would ever hear again--to his lips, and shed tears of anguish over it in the feebleness induced by illness. They might take Mary Dallory to his room as much as they pleased; and Matilda might exert her little wiles in praising her, and madam hers to leave them "accidentally" together; but his heart was too full of another, and of its own bitter pain, to have room for as much as a responsive thought to Mary Dallory. "Arthur is frightfully languid and apathetical!" spoke Miss North one day in a burst of resentment. "I'm sure he is quite rude to me and Mary: he lets us sit by him for an hour at a time, and never speaks." "Consider how ill he has been--and is," remonstrated Sir Nash.