Later that day I had a long conversation with my aunt; she explained to me, that the doctors had assured her, that it was of the greatest importance that my uncle should spend the following winter in a southern climate; that he was himself extremely opposed to this plan, chiefly on account of his inveterate dislike to leaving Elmsley for such a length of time; and that, she was afraid that if he returned there at all that year, she should never be able to persuade him to leave it again. She seemed very much out of spirits; and she, who seldom gave way to her feelings, although their secret workings were evident enough to me, who knew every turn of her countenance, at this moment seemed unable to struggle with her deep depression. After a few efforts to overcome it, she threw her arms round me, and hid her face on my neck. "Dearest child," she said, "never let me suffer through you; anything else I can bear. I see things through a dark mist to-day, and there is a gloom about me which I cannot shake off. I do not often talk to you of myself, Ellen, at least not lately--not since the days when we lived but for each other, and I would not do so now, if an irresistible impulse did not urge me to it. In a few days you will be married, and then will come a separation, which I shall bear with courage; but which will require courage, my Ellen, for I have loved you too much as an idol, too much as a treasure, which nothing could rob me of, and to which I have clung with all the tenacity of a crushed but ardent spirit. All my life I have had to meet indifference, and to struggle with disappointment in various forms. Self-devotion was the dream of my youth; I conceived no other happiness, and wished to live for no other purpose. My father was one of those men who can so little understand this sort of feeling in others, that, with perfect kindness and perfect candour, I am sure he would have said, if his daughter had done for him what the Russian girl, Elizabeth, did for her father, 'I suppose she was tired of Siberia, and liked the journey.' When I married, I found in your uncle a character exactly opposed to my father's, but not perhaps more suited to mine. The invincible reserve, the minute despotism, or rather absolutism, of his nature, raised between us the same barrier, which worldliness of mind and absence of warm feelings had caused to exist between my father and myself. You have seen and observed this drawback to our happiness, Ellen, or I should not have pointed out to you this single imperfection in as amiable and excellent a character as ever existed. Your uncle's favourite maxim is, 'Deeds, not words;' and well has he acted up to it himself; but his mistake is, in not perceiving that there are characters in which, without _words_, there can scarcely be _deeds;_ for which sympathy and encouragement are as necessary as air is to life, or sunshine to vegetation. For some time after I was married, I struggled