You know my theoretical benevolence for everything that lives; you have often smiled at its vanity. I see now that you were right; for it seems to me almost superhuman virtue not to destroy the person who is dearest to me on earth. I remember writing to you some weeks since that I would come to London Little did I know of the weakness of my own mind. I told her that I intended to depart. She turned pale--she trembled--but she did not speak. Those signs which should have hastened my departure have taken away the strength even to think of it. I am here still! I go to E------ every day. Sometimes we sit in silence; I dare not trust myself to speak. How dangerous are such moments! _Ammutiscon lingue parlen l'alme_. Yesterday they left us alone. We had been conversing with Lady Margaret on indifferent subjects. There was a pause for some minutes. I looked up; Lady Margaret had left the room. The blood rushed into my cheek--my eyes met Emily's; I would have given worlds to have repeated with my lips what those eyes expressed. I could not even speak--I felt choked with contending emotions. There was not a breath stirring; I heard my very heart beat. A thunderbolt would have been a relief. Oh God! if there be a curse, it is to burn, swell, madden with feelings which you are doomed to conceal! This is, indeed, to be "a cannibal of one's own heart." [Bacon] It was sunset. Emily was alone upon the lawn which sloped towards the lake, and the blue still waters beneath broke, at bright intervals, through the scattered and illuminated trees. She stood watching the sun sink with wistful and tearful eyes. Her soul was sad within her. The ivy which love first wreathes around his work had already faded away, and she now only saw the desolation of the ruin it concealed. Never more for her was that freshness of unwakened feeling which invests all things with a perpetual daybreak of sunshine, and incense, and dew. The heart may survive the decay or rupture of an innocent and lawful affection-- "la marque reste, mais la blessure guerit"--but the love of darkness and guilt is branded in a character ineffaceable--eternal! The one is, like lightning, more likely to dazzle than to destroy, and, divine even in its danger, it makes holy what it sears; but the other is like that sure and deadly fire which fell upon the cities of old, graving in the barrenness of the desert it had wrought the record and perpetuation of a curse. A low and thrilling voice stole upon Emily's ear. She turned--Falkland stood beside her. "I felt restless and unhappy," he said, "and I came to seek you. If (writes one of the fathers) a guilty and wretched man could behold, though only for a few minutes, the countenance of an angel, the calm and glory which it wears would so sink into his heart, that he would pass at once over the gulf of gone years into his first unsullied state of purity and hope; perhaps I thought of that sentence when I came to