Good-bye for to-day. Do you remember this morning a fortnight ago? It might be last year--it might be yesterday! How strange is the beat of Time's wings! Your EMILIA. LETTER IV. GRAYSMILL, August 2d. Now that's the kind of letter I like to have! Only my heart sickens for thee. At each word I hear your voice; at every pause, the little ripples that run away with it so sweetly. I cannot even find it in me to scold you for your many follies. Young woman, I don't approve of you, but you are the sweetest creature that ever walked this earth. Thanks be where thanks are due that I am a woman; you would have been my bane had I been born a man! But, to be serious, I have been thinking things out; you must leave your mother, Constance, and come to me. You have lived this kind of life long enough; and--believe me, my dearest--you are not strong enough to bear it longer unharmed. Shall I be a little cruel to you? Well, my own, I think that if you looked into your heart, searchingly and truly, as you always declare you know not how, you would find that it is more cowardice than duty binds you to Mrs. Rayner. She bore you, you say, she brought you up--Good Lord! and how! If you were not a pearl among women, what would you be by this time? No, you know as well as I do that it is cowardice, not duty, prevents you from taking this step. I shall never forget what you said to me once, when first I knew you; it was in Florence, and we were leaning out of window in my room. I remember it the better because it was during this conversation that I ventured to put my arm round your waist for the first time. "Now I call this pleasant!" you said. "Here am I looking out of window with a nice girl's arm round my waist, and right away from my mother. She doesn't even know where I am!" I loved my mother so much that this shocked me extremely, and I told you so. You flushed, I remember, and cried:-- "Oh, but you don't know what my life is! You don't know what it is to long with all your might to get away from somebody, somebody who has hung over you ever since you were born, so that she seemed to stand between you and the very air you breathed." And then you told me about your marriage; how, in order to be free from her, you took the husband, rich and infamous, into whose arms she threw you in your innocence; how, at the end of a few months, you returned home doubly a slave, to be crushed, year in, year out, by love that showed itself almost as hate; bound now in such a way that if any other love were offered you, you could not take it.