He read no more then; he got up and paced about the room, holding the letter in his hands. For he seemed to see her as she had once stood before him, with the tears swimming in her eyes; he seemed to see himself as a lower, meaner thing, because he had told her callously of the arrangement he had made to save her honour. This woman--who could write this and mean it all! Another letter, further on, was written with beautiful tenderness, as she might have written to him had she stood in the nearest and dearest relation to him. It is scarcely too much to say that he read it with awe and wonder. "----For they tell me that women sometimes die at such a time as that; and I was never strong. But I am not afraid; that might be best for everyone. Only I want to tell you now--with all the earnestness that is in me, and with all the strength that this change in me has given--that I never loved him. On the night he asked me to marry him I came to you. (Oh, do you remember the old shabby, shadowy room, and you in the light of the lamp, my dear; and all the cold world outside?) I prayed then that you might say something to me; that you might, out of some love for me, snatch me from him. But you did not speak. Then I was sorry for him--and I promised. But so surely as I believe in God, so surely do I write here that I did not love him." "_The child is yours!_ Don't look away from this when you read it, Jimmy dear,--because it's true. The child that is to be mine--born of my body, and part of my very soul--is the spirit-child that might in some better, happier time have been yours. So much is that so, that I have felt, through all the doubts and fears of these months, that the child is yours; the other man has never for a moment entered into my thoughts. He never did, and the sin was never mine. In the long, long dreams of my girlhood, when thoughts and desires were mine that I did not understand, it was always you--never anyone else. The only sorrow I have had--the bitterest thought of all--was that I had been spoiled in your sight; I never thought of anything else. So that if I die, I shall die with that happiness; that I was your wife, not alone in name, but in thought. I never have belonged to anyone else." He laid it aside reverently with the others, and went on reading. All the dear intimate thoughts of her--so innocent and so kindly--so sweet and whimsical--were spread here for him; he wondered that he could ever have thought of any other woman. His heart leaped at the thought that she belonged to him; that he might claim her, and tell her that he loved her. He went on reading.