Dear friend, I will say; for I feel it must be something as good as friendship that can forgive and understand this silence, so much like the veriest human kind of ingratitude. When I look back and think--all this time after that letter, and not a sign made--I wonder. Yet, if you knew! First of all, we were silent because we waited for information which you seemed to desire.... Then there were sadder reasons. Poor _Aurora_, that you were so more than kind to (oh, how can I think of it?), has been steeped in tears, and some of them of a very bitter sort. Your letter was addressed to my husband, you knowing by your delicate true instinct where your praise would give most pleasure; but I believe Robert had not the heart to write when I felt that I should not have the spirits to add a word in the proper key. When we came here from Florence a few months ago to get repose and cheerfulness from the sight of the mountains, we said to ourselves that we would speak to you at ease--instead of which the word was taken from our own mouth, and we have done little but sit by sick beds and meditate on gastric fevers. So disturbed we have been--so sad! our darling precious child the last victim. To see him lying still on his golden curls, with cheeks too scarlet to suit the poor patient eyes, looking so frightfully like an angel! It was very hard. But this is over, I do thank God, and we are on the point of carrying back our treasure with us to Florence to-morrow, quite recovered, if a little thinner and weaker, and the young voice as merry as ever. You are aware that that child I am more proud of than twenty _Auroras_, even after Leigh Hunt has praised them. He is eight years old, has never been '_crammed_', but reads English, Italian, French, German, and plays the piano--then, is the sweetest child! sweeter than he looks. When he was ill, he said to me, 'You pet! don't be unhappy about _me_. Think it's a boy in the street, and be a little sorry, but not unhappy.' Who could not be unhappy, I wonder? I never saw your book called the _Religion of the Heart._ It's the only book of yours I never saw, and I mean to wipe out that reproach on the soonest day possible. I receive more dogmas, perhaps (my 'perhaps' being in the dark rather), than you do. I believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ in the intensest sense--that he was God absolutely. But for the rest, I am very unorthodox--about the spirit, the flesh, and the devil, and if you would not let me sit by you, a great many churchmen wouldn't; in fact, churches do all of them, as at present constituted, seem too narrow and low to hold true Christianity in its proximate developments. I, at least, cannot help believing them so.