"I need not go into further details. You now can trace for yourself the whole course of my relentless persecution, and of her long and bitter struggles. From first to last,--from the hour she pledged her faith to you at the altar, to that in which you surprised her at my feet,--she has been true to you. I say it even now, with jealous rage; for the fierce love with which I have loved her is still smouldering in my breast, and will only die when I die; I say it with the agony of death in my soul,--with the vision of an approaching eternity before me,--she has been true to you: she has loved you as I loved her; and when she clung to my feet, and vainly sued for mercy at my hands, it was to implore that I would suffer her to reveal the truth to you, the acknowledgment of which might then have saved her. She is dying now, and I have not long to live. She has never loved me, and I have loved her,--and I am sometimes mad--not _now_. If you do not believe me, send for the woman who saw her strike the child. Speak to Robert Harding. Curse _me_, and forgive _her_. Alice has forgiven me. Shall you forgive Ellen, and go to her? "I have nothing more to say, and I sit writing to you as if the end of all things was at hand. "Henry Lovell." With a deep-drawn sigh, and a steady gaze on the calm pure sky before him, Mr. Lacy folded and put up this letter. During the rest of his short journey he meditated in silence, on the sorrows he had left behind him, and those he was going in search of; and as he fixed his eyes on the blue and boundless arch over his head, his lips unconsciously repeated that sublime passage in the prophecies of Isaiah:--"My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord; for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." On his arrival at the lodge of the park at Hillscombe, his inquiries after Mr. Middleton were answered by a positive assurance that he was not at home; and it was only after stating that the business he was come upon was of the highest importance, that he could induce the porter to dispatch a note from himself to Mr. Middleton, requesting an immediate interview, and reminding him of some circumstances connected with his late uncle, which gave him an especial claim upon his regard and respect. After a while, the servant returned, and requested Mr. Lacy to proceed to the house. As he drove through those grounds,--as he entered that house, the scene of poor Ellen's brief dream of happiness--as he prepared to meet her husband, he felt nearly overcome by his anxiety for the result of this important interview.