“After these arrangements were completed I determined to put the ocean between me and my persecutor. On my twenty-sixth birthday—just ten years from the day which saw me a bride—I landed in America. Alas! how changed were all my prospects, how altered all my feelings! I was still in the prime of life, but hope and joy and all the sweet influences of affection were lost to me forever, and after wandering from place to place I finally took up my abode in Elmsdale, rather from a sense of utter weariness than from any anticipation of peace. I little knew that Providence had prepared for me so sweet a rest after all my sufferings. I little knew that peace and hope, aye, and even happiness, were yet in store for me. Resigning a name to which I had no longer any claim, I resumed my family name of Norwood, and sought to appear in society as the widowed rather than as the divorced wife. I have thus avoided painful remarks and impertinent questionings, while I was enabled to secure for myself a quiet retreat from the turmoil of the world. Perhaps to you, Charles Allston, I ought to have been more frank, but surely you cannot blame me for shrinking from the disclosure of such bitter and degrading memories. You have now learned all my early history—you have seen my error and you have traced its punishment—let me now unfold the page which can reveal the present. “A fancy, light as the gossamer which the wind drives on its wing, first led to my marriage. I was a child in heart and mind and person, when I became the victim of arts which might have misled a wiser head and a less susceptible heart. Left to myself I should probably have forgotten my first love fancy even as one of the thousand dreams which haunt the brain of youth. But if, after my marriage, I had experienced kindness and tenderness from my husband, the feeling would have deepened into earnest and life-long affection, instead of curdling into hatred and contempt within my bosom. The love of my girlhood was blighted even as a flower which blossoms out of time, and loneliness has hitherto been my lot through life. Will you deem me too bold, my friend, if I tell you that from you I have learned my first lesson in womanly duty? Till I knew you I dreamed not of the power of a fervent and true passion—till I beheld you I believed my heart was cold and dead to all such gentle impulses. You have taught me that happiness may yet be found even for me. In loving you I am but doing homage to virtue and wisdom and piety—in bowing down before your image I am but worshipping the noblest attributes of human nature enshrined within your heart. I dared not pour out the fullness of my joy until I had told you my sad tale, but now that you know all—now that no shadow of distrust can fall upon the sunshine of the future, come to me, and assure me with your own dear voice that my troubled dream is now forever past, and that the dawn of happiness is breaking upon my weary heart!”