"When my husband bids me come? Christie Bayle, you do not know me yet," she said softly. "But, Mrs Hallam--Millicent, my child!" cried Sir Gordon imploringly. "I cannot listen to your appeals," she said in a piteous tone, and with the tears at last gushing from her aching eyes. "Ah," cried Bayle excitedly, "she is giving way. Millicent Luttrell, for your own, for your child's sake, you will stay." She rose up proudly once more. "Millicent _Hallam_ and her child will go." Sir Gordon made an imploring movement. "It is to obtain his release, Julie, my child!" said Mrs Hallam in a tender voice, "the release of our long-suffering martyr. What say you? He calls to us from beyond the seas to come and help him, what must we do?" Again there was a painful silence in that room, every breath seemed to be held till Julia said, in a low, dreamy voice: "Mother, we must go." As she ended, a faint sigh escaped her lips, and she sank as if insensible upon her mother's breast. "Yes," cried Millicent Hallam, gazing straight before her, "were the world a hundred times as wide." VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER SIX. IN HER SERVICE. No, not even to Julia--his own child--for that part of the letter was a commission for her alone to execute. After all these long years of absence he sent her his orders--he, the dear husband of her first love. And, oh! the joy, the intense delight of being able at last to execute his wishes, to work and strive for him, following out his most minute commands. It was a long letter, containing few words of affection, but those she found studded through the ill-written pages, that seemed to have been the work of one who had not touched pen for years, a word that bore a loving guise, shining brightly here and there, as Millicent kissed it with all the fervour of a girl. He said that he had not heard from her all these years, and that she might have written; that he had had to suffer fearful hardships, which he would not inflict upon her, though he was explicit enough to draw agonised tears from the loving woman's eyes; that he had had much to endure, mentally and bodily; that his health had been often bad, and so on, right through the greater portion of the letter. It never struck the patient wife that Hallam barely alluded to her, or suggested that she must have suffered terribly during his long absence. He had left her absolutely penniless, after ruining her father and mother; but here was his first letter, and there was not an allusion to how she had managed to struggle on for all this time--how had she lived? what had she done? how had she managed to keep her child? Not a word of this kind; but it did not trouble the woman who knew all his pains and sufferings by heart, for she was hungering for news of him to whom she had blindly given herself, and the letter was full of that.