She takes out the silver tresses, and looking on them reverently for a few moments, kisses them, and puts them back in the secret drawer--but not the writing; that she holds above the lamp until it has caught fire, and watches it until it is quite consumed, and the last spark has gone out. Then she brings forth from the same hiding-place two letters, evidently both by the same hand--a very unclerkly one--ill-spelled and ill-composed, but which have been to her more dear than any written words for a quarter of a century; for they were letters of a dead man, written, the one when he was her accepted lover, the other after he became her husband. They are letters of the Dead no longer; for he who was thought to have died is still alive, and being so, has become an enemy more terrible than any who should seek her life; one who, by simply saying: “This is my wife,” would thereby dishonour her, disgrace her children, and even shame the memory of that righteous man whose tomb she had just visited, and wept over with such honest tears. And yet with tenderness, though mixed with a certain awe and shrinking, does my Lady look upon those time-worn words, notwithstanding that the sacredness of Death is no longer on them. The first is what is called a love-letter, a note filled with foolish fondness, expressed with vehemence, but without coarseness; the second a tissue of passionate self-reproaches; the writer accusing himself of bringing a curse upon her happy home in having married her; then stating, as though reluctantly, certain arrangements he had made at the seaport,-from which his communication was dated, for the passage of herself and parents by the _North Star_. Both are signed _Ralph Gavestone_. “So loving and so penitent,” murmurs she, “Time cannot surely have worked so ill with such a nature as he would have me believe! When he first sang that carol to my ear, I thought it might have been an angel singing: O'er the hill and o'er the vale Come three kings together.