each a lie to ourselves, and there was no confidence between us, and in me no forbearance. God help me, I was ignorant indeed; and it was not until I had become a lonely looker-on at life that I learned the lessons which earlier might have saved both you and me. "I soon forgave you, Robert; but I have never been able to forgive myself. Perhaps when you have forgiven me, as I know you will, peace will come to me. External quiet I have had, but not peace, though it took me long to learn that I was seeking a vain shadow, under that name, and that in doing the right alone can any human being ever find it. In the day when self-delusion fell away from me, it left me as lonely as I had left you; and there was no possibility of substituting self-made duties for those which God's law and my own vow had laid upon me, and which I had forsaken. If you have been unhappy--and, little as I know you, in comparison with the comprehension which a wife's ought to be, I know you well enough to feel only too sure that you have been unhappy--my life has had no joy in it, no serenity. All that ever pleased me in the past has utterly lost its charm. God has had too much compassion on me to suffer me to say, 'Peace, peace, when there is no peace;' and now the end of the struggle has come. Careless words spoken by a stranger have been a revelation to me. You have sought for me in vain, Robert; then you desire to find me? Is it that you love me still, as you loved me in those evil days when I so ill requited your love? Or is it because you too would expiate the past for God's sake and the right? Whatever be your motive, there is but one course for me--the course I am taking. If you will receive me, I am ready to return to you whenever you shall summon me.