"'When we meet!' Lewis, will you, can you forget your manifold wrongs and come back to me? I do not plead, now, 'for the sake of our child.' Her sinless soul henceforth can know no pain or woe. God saw that I was not worthy of her, and He took her. In the earlier weeks of my selfish mourning, I had no thought of your bereavement. Latterly, I have longed to comfort you, for I know that your heart is riven by this stroke. She was your joy, as she was my angel of peace. Her loss is our common sorrow. Shall it not draw us together? Yet, as I have said, our estrangement cannot now affect her. Thoughtless of evil, she passed away. Had she lived, the Omniscient only knows what grief and mortification might have darkened her pathway. Nor do I desire a reconciliation as a shield from the world's sneer or ban. I hold its applause and its censure alike cheaply. In prosperity, its favors were painted, tasteless fruit; in adversity, it would have fed my starving heart with husks. But for my sake--by the thought of my late and sore repentance; by the remorse that must gnaw my spirit, when I remember your noble trust in me, your unswerving fidelity, your generous love and my base requital of it all; by the sorrow that never leaves me by day or by night--forgive me, and return to the home we have both forsaken! I will serve you very faithfully, my husband! I have gained other and higher views of the marriage relation within a short time past. However presumptuously I may have assumed its responsibilities, however unworthily I performed its duties in former days, I would enter upon our re-engagement with a solemn sense of what I owe to you and to Him who united us. You must have despised me at our parting, and since. Perhaps you have come to think of me with dislike as well as contempt. I will bear this--grievous though the burden will be--as a part of my righteous punishment. I will never murmur--never, even in thought, accuse you of unjust harshness, if you will grant me the opportunity to make what amends I can for all you have lost and suffered through my fault." Sarah was still far from strong; and wearied as much by the intensity of her feelings as by the manual effort of writing, she laid the pen down, and leaned back in the cushioned chair. Her table stood in the parlor beneath the window overlooking the river. The room was prim and clean, as of yore, with its straight lines of chairs; its shining specks of mirrors; the grim black profiles above the mantel, and the green boughs in the fireplace. The outer scene was in its general features, that which the girl had surveyed, with pleased surprise, the July evening of her arrival here two years ago.