“Oh yes,--at once. That is, in a day or two,--after he shall have received my letter. Why should I wait?” We sat down to write a cheque, and she, seeing what we were doing, asked how much it was to be. “No;--half that will do,” she said. “Mamma will not go. We have talked it over and decided it. Yes; I know all about that. I am going to see my lover,--my dying lover; and I have to beg for the money to take me to him. Of course I am a young girl; but in such a condition am I to stand upon the ceremony of being taken care of? A housemaid wouldn’t want to be taken care of at eighteen.” We did exactly as she bade us, and then attempted to comfort her while the young man went to get money for the cheque. What consolation was possible? It was simply necessary to admit with frankness that sorrow had come from which there could be no present release. “Yes,” she said. “Time will cure it,--in a way. One dies in time, and then of course it is all cured.” “One hears of this kind of thing often,” she said afterwards, still leaning forward in her chair, still with something of the old expression in her eyes,--something almost of humour in spite of her grief; “but it is the girl who dies. When it is the girl, there isn’t, after all, so much harm done. A man goes about the world and can shake it off; and then, there are plenty of girls.” We could not tell her how infinitely more important, to our thinking, was her life than that of him whom she was going to see now for the last time; but there did spring up within our mind a feeling, greatly opposed to that conviction which formerly we had endeavoured to impress upon herself,--that she was destined to make for herself a successful career. She went, and remained by her lover’s bed-side for three weeks. She wrote constantly to her mother, and once or twice to ourselves. She never again allowed herself to entertain a gleam of hope, and she spoke of her sorrow as a thing accomplished. In her last interview with us she had hardly alluded to her novel, and in her letters she never mentioned it. But she did say one word which made us guess what was coming. “You will find me greatly changed in one thing,” she said; “so much changed that I need never have troubled you.” The day for her return to London was twice postponed, but at last she was brought to leave him. Stern necessity was too strong for her. Let her pinch herself as she might, she must live down in Dorsetshire,--and could not live on his means, which were as narrow as her own. She left him; and on the day after her arrival in London she walked across from Euston Square to our office.