"You will forgive my saying it—you have had some peculiar secret from me for a long time—not your coming here, but something quite different. I knew that when you suddenly left the stage, and wouldn’t return, for no reason whatever. Why should _you_ have left the stage, of all people?" "I left it simply because I got to dislike it—to hate it!" Nelly Featherstone said nothing, but she was evidently not satisfied with the answer. She remained unusually thoughtful for some time. "And now you are going to America," she said. "Is there no other reason besides your wish to visit those places you speak of?" "There is; but it is of no consequence to any one." CHAPTER XXXIX. ’THE COULIN.’ The snow that shone and gleamed in the sunlight along the Berkshire hills lay thick in the London squares, and was trampled brown and dry in the London streets; and yet even in the City it was white enough to throw a light upon the faces of the passers-by, until commonplace countenances underwent a sort of transfiguration; and there was in the atmosphere a pearly radiance that brightened the fronts of the grey houses, and glimmered into small and dingy rooms. "Let all the light come in," said Dove, lying in bed, with a strange transparent colour in her cheeks, and a wan lustre in her beautiful violet eyes; and when they let the strong light in, it fell on her face, and painted away the shadows under the eyebrows until the head that lay on the soft pillow acquired a strange ethereal glory—a vision coloured with sunlight. "You haven’t played ’The Coulin’ for me for a long time now, Dove," said Mr. Anerley. "You used never to like my playing ’The Coulin;’ why do you want me to play it now?" "I wish you were well enough to play anything, my darling." The girl stretched out her tiny pale hand towards his: "How you have petted me lately! If I were to get up just now and sing you the song I used to sing you, you wouldn’t laugh at my ’meghily’ any more, would you?" "_Meghily, meghily shall I sleep now_"—the words sounded in his ears as the refrain of some spirit-song, heard long ago, in happy times, down in the far-off legendary Kentish Eden, where they had once lived. "A letter for you, papa," said Mrs. Anerley, entering the room. "I don’t want it," he said, petulantly and angrily turning away—quarrelling with the mist of bitter tears that rose around his eyes. She glanced from him to Dove (her kindly eyes brightened as they met the quiet look of the girl), laid the letter down, and left the room again. Mechanically he took up the letter, opened it, and read it. Before he had finished, however, he seemed to recall himself; and then he read it again from the beginning—carefully, anxiously, with strange surprise on his face. He looked at the envelope, again at the letter, and finally at the bank-note which he held in his hand.