“I hesitate to break that silence which you most emphatically enforced when we last met, but the news of your bereavement, which I have just learnt from my father, so stirs my heart that write I must, and should this only offend you more deeply I must pay the penalty. That you are desolate and sad at heart I well know. My beloved, if only I could comfort you I would ask nothing more--but this is the sorest part of our unhappy difference as to the war, that I am cut off from the right of serving you, and am doubtful whether you will even be at the trouble to read these lines. But should you read them, then I pray you read betwixt the lines the love for you which fills my heart--a love that is ill at expressing itself in words, but which will always be longing to serve you while life lasts. It is some consolation to me to know that you are with your grandfather, whose kindness when last he parted with me I cannot forget. I have just had the pleasure of seeing Sir Ralph Hopton, the noblest of all His Majesty’s Generals, being sent (in the absence of Captain Joscelyn Heyworth) with a letter from Sir W. Waller. Sir Ralph was kind enough to call cousins with me on account of Mistress Martha Harford, who was afterwards wedded to Mr. Michael Hopton--you will remember smiling over her mistaken epitaph on the monument in Bosbury Church. Was it in some other life that we spent that happy day at Bosbury, when we were betrothed? Would to God we could find ourselves there once more with hearts united! Should you see my father, will you let him know that we are expecting a decisive battle in the neighbourhood of Bath? I will write to him after it is over. “Dear Hilary, for the sake of old days, I pray you at least to accept my sympathy in your sorrow, and “Believe that I rest ever “Your faithful servant, “Gabriel Harford.” Norton’s face, as he read, was a curious study. Anything more unlike his notion of a love-letter it was impossible to conceive. He read it twice, and a new sense of shame began to steal over him. His eyes at length rivetted themselves on the one sentence, “for the sake of old days,” but he was looking, in truth, at some scene long ago in his own life--a scene which softened him strangely, and called out the better side of his nature. “Curse it!” he cried, at length, beginning to pace the room restlessly. “I wish I had never meddled with that boy’s love-letter. God! if I could undo the past!” With a hand that shook, he took up a tankard of ale and hastily drained it. “Humph! that’s better,” he muttered. “A pox on such soft-hearted sentiment! It must be as the proverb hath it, ‘Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.’ I can no more undo my past than I can get this letter back into the messenger’s pocket, and there’s an end on’t.”