So she kept to her resolution, writing the occasional notes she had promised to write to her poor forsaken girls, without saying a word of her illness; and when she grew better, though not strong enough to undertake a new situation, finding her money slipping away--though, with her good salaries and small wants, she was not poor, and had already begun to lay up for a lonely old age--she accepted this temporary home at Miss Maclachlan's, at Brighton. Was it--so strange are the under-currents which guide one's outward life--was it because she had found a curious charm in the old lady's Scotch tongue, unheard for years? That the two little pupils were Indian children, and that the house was at the seaside?--and she had never seen the sea since she left St. Andrews. It was going back to the days of her youth to sit, as now, watching the sunshine glitter on the far-away ocean. The very smell of the sea-weed, the lap-lap of the little waves, brought back old recollections so vividly--old thoughts, some bitter, some sweet, but the sweetness generally over-coming the bitterness. "I have had all the joy that the world could bestow; I have lived--I have loved." So sings the poet, and truly. Though to this woman love had brought not joy, but sorrow, still she had loved, and it had been the main-stay and stronghold of her life, even though to outsiders it might have appeared little better than a delusion, a dream. Once, and by one only, her whole nature had been drawn out, her ideal of moral right entirely satisfied. And nothing had ever shattered this ideal. She clung to it, as we cling to the memory of our dead children, who are children forever. With a passionate fidelity she remembered all Robert Roy's goodness, his rare and noble qualities, resolutely shutting her eyes to what she might have judged severely, had it happened to another person--his total, unexplained, and inexplicable desertion of herself. It was utterly irreconcilable with all she had ever known of him; and being powerless to unravel it, she left it, just as we have to leave many a mystery in heaven and earth, with the humble cry, "I can not understand--I love." She loved him, that was all; and sometimes even yet, across that desert of despair, stretching before and behind her, came a wild hope, almost a conviction, that she would meet him again, somewhere, somehow. This day, even, when, after an hour's delicious idleness, she roused herself to take her little girls down to the beach, and sat on the shingle while they played, the sound and sights of the sea brought old times so vividly back that she could almost have fancied coming behind her the familiar step, the pleasant voice, as when Mr. Roy and his boys used to overtake her on the St. Andrews shore--Robert Roy, a young man, with his life all before him, as was hers. Now she was middle-aged, and he--he must be over forty by this time. How strange!