Edward Maxwell had not gone to India. After _her_ fate was united to his, her father made some exertions to establish them at home. They were shortly going to Glasgow I heard, but as far as I could I shut my ears to their name; and though many mentioned them before me with cruel smiles, there were some who knew more truly the nature of my feelings, and tried to hush the rest. But it is hard to do what I laboured to accomplish. To convince one’s self that the being held highest and most loveworthy through all one’s lifetime has altogether vanished from this earth, though there still remains the external form in which the imagination shrouded so fair and beautiful a spirit. I knew indeed that the Lilias of my fancy had never been, but I could not mourn for her as for one dead. No, the dead are sure. Our most jealous fears cannot think of change--our utmost misery of grief cannot suppose end of existence to them. I fancy the very death makes them more peculiarly our own; but far other and far bitterer is such a calamity as mine. I was shortly to prove both. The Murrays were gone, no one knew whither; a single servant remained in the house, but she could give me no information as to the retreat of her master. I felt that I did wrong to ask her, and when I wrote to Hew, I did not repeat the question. In the beginning of the year, Hew answered my letter. I remember noticing with sudden fear that the address was not written in his hand; but the long letter within reässured me, and I did not observe, in my eagerness to read it, another brief note which dropped from the enclosure upon the table. There was a tone of subdued and unexpressed sympathy in the letter which touched me deeply. No one in this world, not even Lucy, could enter into my feelings as Hew could, and what he said was the inferred sorrow of closest friendship; the sympathy which does not speak of your grief, but which enters into your heart, and stands at your own stand-point, and thinks as you think--as you think, but more gently--as you will think when your grief is further away, and in the hushed and quiet land of memory it has become dim and calm.