think, darling, that I am saying, ‘God keep and guard her safely through the night! God fill her heart with peace and gladness, whether she sleeps or wakes!’ “And so, my own dear wife, for the first and last time in my life, I sign myself your true and loyal husband, “FRANCIS TREDETHLYN.” Julia had fluttered out of the room and into the little conservatory, where there were always faded leaves to be snipped off, or bird-cages to be replenished with fresh water. Miss Desmond, in her darkest mood, was too much a lady to sit by and stare while Maude possessed herself of the contents of her husband’s letter. She lingered among the twittering canary-birds and sprawling ferns so long as she considered that delicacy demanded she should be absent, and then she strolled back to the breakfast-table with a look of supreme unconsciousness. But she gave a little scream as she glanced across the table at Mrs. Tredethlyn, and flew to the bell. Maude had finished her letter, which lay in scattered sheets at her feet, and she had fallen back upon the sofa-pillows in a dead faint. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXXVII. ELEANOR DROPS IN UPON ROSAMOND. It is strange what virtues we are apt to discover in the thing we have lost. After recovering from her fainting-fit, Maude Tredethlyn wept as bitterly for the loss of her husband as if he had been the first choice of her maiden heart. A young lady told Mr. de Quincey that, being on the point of drowning, she saw in one instant her whole life exhibited before her in its minutest details, like a vast picture;--and so the young wife, reading her husband’s solemn farewell, beheld in a moment the picture of her courtship and married life, and saw how good he had been to her. Yes, in that one moment a thousand instances--such trifling instances, some of them--of his goodness and devotion, his enduring love, his patient self-abnegation, flashed upon her, and her heart smote her with a bitter anguish as she perceived her own unworthiness. “I had no right to take his love as I take the love of my dogs,” she thought; “giving him nothing in return for his devotion.” At first, as she read her husband’s epistle, she smiled at his talk of leaving her, and thought how easy a thing it would be to lay her hand upon his shoulder and draw him down to his old place at her feet. She forgot all about the cottage at Petersham when she thought this. And then, as she read farther and farther, she recognized the solemn meaning of the letter, and felt that it was indeed a farewell. Then a sudden mist came between her and the page; all the machinery in London seemed buzzing and booming in her ears; and she fell back amongst the downy cushion, whiter than the pure ground of the rosebud chintz which Harcourt Lowther had selected for the upholstery of her nest.