I am still keeping very well, although have missed the ball-playing very much for the last three weeks, as O. K., {153} who used to play with me, has been ill. I think my weight is very good considering the hard exercise I have been taking and the good condition I am in. I hope my precious one is getting strong again and that she will have some good news to tell me of our little daughter when she writes next. YOUR OWN LOVING HUSBAND. I will not speak of my anguish when I found that the child of my love was slowly dying, and that the doctors I called in could do nothing for her. Slowly she faded from me, daily gaining in that far-reaching expression of understanding that dying children have so strongly, and my pain was the greater in that I feared her father would never see her now. Willie was very good; I told him my baby was dying and I must be left alone. He had no suspicion of the truth, and only stipulated that the child should be baptized at once--urged thereto, I think, by his mother and sister. I had no objection to this. Parnell and I had long before agreed that it would be safer to have the child christened as a Catholic, and he had no feeling at all against the Catholic religion, considering, indeed, that for those who required a religion it was an admirable one. I made an altar of flowers in my drawing-room, as the child was much too ill to be taken to church, and there the priest, Father Hart, came and baptized Sophie Claude. Sophie, after Parnell's sister, Claude, after Lord Truro, an old friend of mine. A few days before the death of my baby I had the unspeakable comfort of knowing that Parnell could come to me for a few hours and perhaps see his child while she lived. His nephew, son of his sister Delia (Mrs. Thomson), had died in Paris, and the authorities gave Parnell leave on "parole" to attend the young man's {154} funeral. A brilliant, handsome fellow, great sympathy was felt with the parents of this only son. Spring was very early that year, and in the April morning when the air was fragrant with the sweet freshness of the spring flowers and the very breath of life was in the wind, Parnell came to me and I put his dying child into his arms. That evening he had to go on to Paris. GRAND HOTEL, 12 BOULEVARD DES CAPUCINES, PARIS. _Thursday, April_ 13, 1882. MY OWN QUEENIE,--I hope to leave Paris on Saturday morning. The doctor says the fever is not infectious, but I doubt it very much, as a great many people amongst the American colony are having it just now. I am staying here, but I am obliged to go to the house, which has been well disinfected, to see my sister, who is very much cut up. The risk to me is a minimum, as I had this fever very badly when I was young, and they say people very rarely have it a second time, and then only slightly. At all events it is the ordinary typhoid, which doctors say is not catching.