"Good-bye for the present. My dear boy, I thank God on my knees, night and morning for having given you back to me in my old age. "Your ever affectionate aunt, "Caroline. "P. S.--You remember pretty little Kitty Hardwicke you used to flirt with, who married young St. Clair, who's now Lord Kidderminster? She's just had three at a birth; she had twins only last year; the Queen's delighted. Pray be careful about never getting wet feet--" One stormy evening in May, Mrs. Gibson drove Ida and Leah and me and Mr. Babbage, a middle-aged but very dapper War Office clerk (who was a friend of the Gibson family), to Chelsea, that we might explore Cheyne Walk and its classic neighborhood. I rode on the box by the coachman. We alighted by the steamboat pier and explored, I walking with Leah. We came to a very narrow street, quite straight, the narrowest street that could call itself a street at all, and rather long; we were the only people in it. It has since disappeared, with all that particular part of Chelsea. Suddenly we saw a runaway horse without a rider coming along it at full gallop, straight at us, with a most demoralizing sharp clatter of its iron hoofs on the stone pavement. "Your backs to the wall!" cried Mr. Babbage, and we flattened ourselves to let the maddened brute go by, bridle and stirrups flying--poor Mrs. Gibson almost faint with terror. Leah, instead of flattening herself against the wall, put her arms round her mother, making of her own body a shield for her, and looked round at the horse as it came tearing up the street, striking sparks from the flag-stones. Nobody was hurt, for a wonder; but Mrs. Gibson was quite overcome. Mr. Babbage was very angry with Leah, whose back the horse actually grazed, as he all but caught his hoofs in her crinoline and hit her with a stirrup on the shoulder. I could only think of Leah's face as she looked round at the approaching horse, with her protecting arms round her mother. It was such a sudden revelation to me of what she really was, and its expression was so hauntingly impressive that I could think of nothing else. Its mild, calm courage, its utter carelessness of self, its immense tenderness--all blazed out in such beautiful lines, in such beautiful white and black, that I lost all self-control; and when we walked back to the pier, following the rest of the party, I asked her to be my wife. She turned very pale again, and the flesh of her chin quivered as she told me that was _quite impossible--and could never be_. I asked her if there was anybody else, and she said there was nobody, but that she did not wish ever to marry; that, beyond her parents and Ida, she loved and respected me more than anybody else in the whole world, but that she could never marry me. She was much agitated, and said the sweetest, kindest things, but put all hope out of the question at once.