"I cannot even guess how you have been brought up or what your principles are or your ideas of duty. I wish I could. I am very old-fashioned myself, I find, and so very few young people nowadays seem to have the same opinion about serious things that I have. I wish I could be sure you were a sincere Christian. I wish I were certain you held fast to the old ideas of duty and self-sacrifice that have been the honor and the glory of the good women of the past. But I have no right to expect that you will think about all these things just as I do. And I know only too well how weak I am myself and how neglectful I have been in improving my own opportunities. The most I can do is to hope that you will do what I have always tried to do ever since I married John--and long before, too--and that is to make him happy and to watch over him. "If you are very young perhaps you do not yet know that men are not like us women; they need to be taken care of just like children. It is a blessed privilege to be a mother, but a childless wife can at least be a mother to her husband. That is what I have been trying to do all these years. I have tried to watch over John as though he were my only son. Perhaps if our little girl had lived to grow up I might have seen a divided duty before me. But it pleased God to take her to Himself when she was only a baby in arms, and He has never given me another. Many a night I have lain awake with my arms aching to clasp that little body again; but the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord! So I have had nothing to draw me away from my duty to John. If you have children some day--and God grant that you may, for John's heart is set on a boy--if you have children, don't let your love for them draw you away from John. Remember that he was first in your love, and see that he is last also. He will say nothing, for he is good and generous; but he is quick to see neglect, and it would be bitter if he were left alone in his old age. "You will find out in time that he is very sensitive, for all he is a man and does not complain all the time. So be cheerful always, as it annoys him to see anybody in pain or suffering in any way. It is a great comfort to me now that the disease that is going to take me away from him sooner or later, I cannot know when--that it is sudden and not disfiguring, and that he need not know anything at all about it until it is all over. I have made the doctor promise not to tell him till I am dead.