"The knowledge I have gained is the knowledge of your loss of fortune--ruin. The person who mentioned it called it in the strong phrase natural to those who love wealth best, and value it above all. I hope it is not so bad as this; but whatever it be, you are what the world I lived in once, but which has forgotten me, and which I have forgotten, calls a poor man. Thus the great barrier which did exist between you and me exists no longer, and I can address you as frankly and as freely as I will, with my whole heart. You may have ceased to love me, you may not care for my pardon now; but at least you cannot say I am tired of obscurity and poverty, and would return to my former position of wealth and luxury as your wife. Neither you nor the world, if it should ever know any thing of me again,--nor even my own proud self-doubting heart, which has so often tortured me with suggestions of deceitful motives,--can whisper that I have any purpose but the right to serve in this. "I have suffered and learned since I left you, Robert. That suffering has been good for me, and that learning has changed me; so that I have often wished to do that which I am now doing, but have been held back by pride. For I am asking you to take me back; I am asking you to give me once more the place in your home and in your life which I wilfully, in my blind wrath, abandoned. The wrong you did me I have long ago forgiven; will you forgive me the wrong I have done you? I never understood it aright until I knew that your fortunes had fallen, until I knew that you, too, had lapsed out of your place in the world; and then, though you never cared for these things as I cared for them, I came to understand what I had done to you. You hid all your troubles from me; you kept a cheerful face to me when your heart was sad; and you allowed me to lavish money when it was melting out of your hands; you never found a fault with me, or denied a wish of mine its most ample gratification. Foolish, vain, worthless wishes they were, and I think of them with shame; but I remember your forbearance, your generosity, your constant kindness with gratitude, which is no new feeling, for I have been learning life's lessons for a long time in silence and loneliness; and if I could have conquered my pride, if I could have known above all what I know now, I should long ago have told you this. What am I, that I should be relentless to you? what am I, that I should not forgive? I never fulfilled a wife's duties; I never understood them; no one ever tried to teach me but one, and I set my headstrong will against her. I left you to sorrow and perplexity, to humiliation, and to ruin; I, who had enjoyed your wealth, and had married you without love. Your sin was not greater in reality than mine, Robert. I wonder can any sin be really greater than a marriage without love? But I was implacable to you, and you never complained of me. We lived together, the one a mystery for the other,