She posted the letter secretly, feeling that mother and brother would oppose the act, and that day the rustic postman was half-a-crown the richer upon his promising to retain and deliver into her own hands any letter addressed to her which might arrive. Then she waited patiently for days in the grim, cheerless home, where her brother seemed to be settling down into a thoughtful, dreamy man, who was ageing rapidly, and whose eyes always looked full of some terrible trouble, which was eating away his life, while, if possible, Mrs Alleyne looked older, thinner, and more careworn than of yore. Oldroyd came at intervals professionally, but there was a peculiar distance observed between him and Lucy, who treated him with petulant angry resentment, and he was reserved and cold. But his visits did no good. There were no walks with the doctor, no garden flowers bloomed at the astronomer's touch. Alleyne studied harder than ever, and his name rose in reputation among the scientific, but he received no visitors, paid no calls, and only asked for one thing from those of his household--to be let alone. A week had elapsed before the postman, with a great deal of mysterious action, slipped a note into Lucy's hand, making her run to her room trembling and feeling guilty, to hold the letter open, illegible for the tears which veiled her eyes. At last, though, she read the few brief lines which it contained:-- "Think of the past, Lucy, as of happy days spent with one who loved you, and who is now dead. Better that we should never meet again. Better, perhaps, if I had never lived. God bless _you_, dear. Good-bye." Poor Lucy was too ill to appear at dinner that day, and for several more she did not stir out. Then Mrs Alleyne insisted upon her going for a walk, and, as if drawn by fate, she went straight toward the fir mount to climb to the top, where she could sit down and gaze at Brackley, and try to make out Glynne, who might be walking in the garden. No: she saw no tall white figure there, and she felt that unless she borrowed some "optick tube" from her brother's observatory, she was not likely to see her friend a mile away, and she stood there low-spirited and tearful. "If I could only see her, and say,--`Glynne, sister, what is all that terrible trouble to us? You are still the only friend I ever loved,' and clasp her in my arms, and let her tears mingle with mine. Oh, please God," she said, softly, speaking like a little child, as she sank upon her knees amongst the thickly-shed pine needles, and clasped her hands, "let there be no more sorrow for my poor, dear friend; make her happy once again."