Her first movement was that of surprise. In all her dreams of the possible appearance of this room, she had never imagined it to be like this. Plain, rude and homely, its high walls unornamented, its floor uncovered, its furniture limited to a plain desk and two or three rather uncomfortable-looking chairs, it struck upon her fancy with the same sense of incongruity, as might the sight of a low-eaved cottage in the midst of stately palaces and lordly pleasure-grounds. Setting down her candle, she folded her hands to still their tremblings, and slowly looked around her. This was the spot, then, to which he was accustomed to flee when oppressed by any care or harassed by any difficulty; this cold, bare, uninviting apartment with its forbidding aspect unsoftened by the tokens of a woman’s care or presence! To this room, humbler than any in her aunt’s home in Grotewell, he had brought all his griefs, from the day his baby lay dead in the rooms below, to that awful hour which saw the wife and mother brought into his doors and laid a cold and pulseless form in the midst of his gorgeous parlors! Here he had met his own higher impulses face to face, and wrestled with them through the watches of the night! In this wilderness of seeming poverty, he had dreamed, perhaps, his first fond dream of her as a woman, and signed perhaps his final renunciation of her as the future companion of his life! What did it mean? Why a spot of so much desolation in the midst of so much that was lordly and luxurious? Her fears might give her a possible interpretation, but she would not listen to fears. Only his words should instruct her. Going to the desk, she opened it. A sealed envelope addressed to herself, immediately met her eyes. Taking it out with a slow and reverent touch, she began to read the long and closely written letter which it contained. And the little candle burned on, shedding its rays over her bended head and upon the dismal walls about her, with a persistency that seemed to bring out, as in letters of fire, the hidden history of long ago, with its vanished days and its forgotten midnights. XXXIX. FROM A. TO Z. “A naked human heart.”—YOUNG. “My Beloved Child: “So may I call you in this the final hour of our separation, but never again, dear one, never again. When I said to you, just twenty-four hours ago, that my sin was buried and my future was clear, I spake as men speak who forget the justice of God and dream only of his mercy. An hour’s time convinced me that an evil deed once perpetrated by a man, is never buried so that its ghost will not rise. Do as we will, repent as we may, the shadowy phantom of a stained and unrighteous youth is never laid; nor is a man justified in believing it so, till death has closed his eyes, and fame written its epitaph upon his tomb.