Letty's recovery was very slow. The spring was close at hand before the bloom began to reappear--and then it was but fitfully--in Letty's cheek. Neither her gayety nor her usual excess of timorousness returned. A certain sad seriousness had taken the place of both, and she seemed to look out from deeper eyes. I can not think that Letty had begun to perceive that there actually is a Nature shaping us to its own ends; but I think she had begun to feel that Mary lived in the conscious presence of such a power. To Tom she behaved very sweetly, but more like a tender sister than a lover, and Mary began to doubt whether her heart was altogether Tom's. From mention of approaching marriage, she turned with a nervous, uneasy haste. Had the insight which the enforced calmness of suffering sometimes brings opened her eyes to anything in Tom? The doubt filled Mary with anxiety. She thought and thought, until--delicate matter as it was to meddle with, and small encouragement as Godfrey Wardour had given her to expect sympathy--she yet made up her mind to speak to him on the subject--and the rather that she was troubled at the unworthiness of his behavior to Letty: gladly would she have him treat her with the generosity essential to the idea she had formed of him. She went, therefore, one Sunday evening, to Thornwick, and requested to see Mr. Wardour. It was plainly an unwilling interview he granted her, but she was not thereby deterred from opening her mind to him. "I fear, Mr. Wardour," she said, "--I come altogether without authority--but I fear Letty has been rather hurried in her engagement with Mr. Helmer. I think she dreads being married--at least so soon." "You would have her break it off?" said Godfrey, with cold restraint. "No; certainly not," replied Mary; "that would be unjust to Mr. Helmer. But the thing was so hastened, indeed, hurried, by that unhappy accident, that she had scarcely time to know her own mind." "Miss Marston," answered Godfrey, severely, "it is her own fault--all and entirely her own fault." "But, surely," said Mary, "it will not do for us to insist upon desert. That is not how we are treated ourselves." "Is it not?" returned Godfrey, angrily. "My experience is different. I am sure my faults have come back upon me pretty sharply.--She _must_ marry the fellow, or her character is gone." "I am unwilling to grant that, Mr. Wardour. It was wrong in her to have anything to say to Mr. Helmer without your knowledge, and a foolish thing to meet him as she did; but Letty is a good girl, and you know country ways are old-fashioned, and in itself there is nothing wicked in having a talk with a young man after dark." "You speak, I dare say, as such things arc regarded in--certain strata of society," returned Godfrey, coldly; "but such views do not hold in that to which either of them belongs."