an old place, and I feel that Rowley Court is one of those from which the old 'luck' has passed away. So far as leaving the place is concerned, I believe my advice will only anticipate, if even it does anticipate, the resolution I fully expect to hear you have by this time taken. And now to my other point. Society in England and English law do not recognise such a marriage as that of yourself and Gertrude would be; and under anything like ordinary circumstances I should be one of the first and strongest protestants against such a union; but as I have already said, yours are the most exceptional circumstances conceivable out of the region of the wildest romance. Your marriage with Gertrude could not injure any rights, or offend any principles or prejudices, as no one ever likely to see your faces again, or, if you did marry, ever to be aware of the fact, has the least notion of the existence of those circumstances. Sell the property, leave England, and if you still love Gertrude, as she loves you, marry her, and seek happiness and home in a foreign land. I write now, you must bear in mind, remembering that she is entirely ignorant of the complication in your story and hers which sets it apart from perhaps any other human experience. She regards herself as a faulty woman, who deceived the man she loved by an assumption which she deems unpardonable, undeniable, even after that wretched man's death had set her free. You regard her as still (as I believe) the object of your truest love, but parted from you by the fact that the man who made her miserable, and might have made her guilty had not true love intervened to save her, was your own brother, the author of the misery which made the latter years of your father dark and cheerless. These are both substantial truths and phantoms,--the first in their simple existence, the second in the effect they ought to produce on such a mind as yours. The misfortunes of your life are irremediable; but they are also past and gone, and the future may still be yours--yours too, without a braving of opinion, a defiance of the world to which you would probably not feel equal, if the selection of your future course of proceeding were put before you hampered with any such imperative condition. You might take wealth with you to a foreign land, and the antecedents of your wife could never be known there to anyone; here, only to me; and I am ready to give your determination to carry out such a scheme as this my warmest approbation and support, though, if you do it, I must lose the society of my child, which is inexpressibly dear to me. But I owe it to Gertrude, and still more to Gertrude's mother, that I should not rest content with a half-compensation to my daughter, that she should not be only half-happy. I know in what her true happiness would consist, and it shall not be wanting through any failure of self-denial on my part. My time here is not to be long; perhaps it may be