When I got home, I found among my letters one from Mr. Ames. He could not leave the country without pleading once more for my esteem, he wrote. He had not intended to marry until he could think more calmly of the past; but Lucy's mother had married again very suddenly into a family where her daughter found it not pleasant to follow her. She was poor, without very near relatives now, and friends, on both sides, had urged the marriage. He had told her the state of his feelings, and offered, if she could overlook the want of love, to be everything else to her. She should never repent the step, and he prayed me, when I thought of him, to think as leniently as possible. Alas! now I must not think at all. How I fought that thought,--how I worked by day, and studied deep into the night, filling every hour full to the brim with activity, seems now a feverish dream to me. Such dead thoughts will not be buried out of sight, but lie cold and stiff, until the falling foliage of seasons of labor and experience eddies round them, and moss and herbs venture to grow over their decay, and birds come slowly and curiously to sing a little there. In time, the mound is beautiful with the richness of the growth, but the lord of the manor shudders as he walks that way. For him, it is always haunted. Thus with me. I knew that the sorrow was doing me good, that it had been needed long, and I tried to profit by it, as the time came when I could think calmly of it all. I thought I had ceased to love him; but the news of her death (for she died in two years) taught me better. I heard of him from others,--that he had been most tender and indulgent to a selfish, heartless woman, who trifled with his best feelings, and almost broke his heart before she went. I heard that he had one child, a poor little blind baby, for whom the mother had neither love nor care, and that he still continued abroad. But from himself I never heard a word. No doubt he had forgotten me, as I had always thought he would. More than two years passed, and spring-time was upon us, when I heard that he had returned to the country, and was to be married shortly to a wealthy, beautiful widow he had found abroad. At first we heard that he was married, and then that he was making great preparations, but would not marry until autumn. Even the bride's dress was described, and the furniture of the house of which she was to be mistress. I had expected some such thing, but it added one more drop of bitterness to the yearning I had for him. It was so hard to think him like any other man!