On the last day of this year I was working on “The Bow.” It had been a wonderful year full of great mercies and strange sorrows. During it “Jan Vedder’s Wife,” “The Hallam Succession,” and “The Lost Silver of Briffault” had been published; and “The Last of the McAllisters,” pirated. I had regained my health, and my foot only asked to be used with some mercy and discretion. Though I had lived very simply, I had been comfortable, and had had no care about money matters. As to what went on in my soul, I shall say nothing here. I ought to have been a happy woman, but I was unhappy in my domestic life. I was sure that Lilly was resolved to marry Captain Morgan. He came to see her constantly, and wrote to her once, frequently twice, a day. His influence pervaded the house, darkened my life, and made my success of no consequence.
Hitherto my desire or advice had been sufficient for Lilly, but now they were nothing against a sheet of paper. Only a sheet of paper, written over in a bold, much frescoed style, and there was nothing I could say that could stand against it. The sunlight had gone from my days, and life felt haggard and thin without Lilly’s sympathy. I did not blame her much. My position appeared to her unreasonable. I knew nothing wrong of Captain Morgan, and I had been shown a letter which proved him a favorite with his company.
“Why will you think wrong of Frank, Mamma?” she asked one day. “Nobody says wrong of him.”
“But I have an undeniable intuition that something is wrong,” I said.
“Intuition!” she cried. “That is not fair, Mamma. I am willing to listen to reason, but intuition, no.”
“Yet, Lilly,” I answered, “reason is only human perplexity. If we know, and are sure of a thing, we don’t reason about it. Intuition is far above reason. It is absolute knowledge. It comes from the spiritual region of our nature, and makes the mind knowing, and the object known, one. It never deceives.”
“Then I say, it ought to be more precise. It tells you to beware of Frank, it ought also to tell you why.”
“If there is a finger-post on the sea sands with the word ‘danger’ on it, is it necessary to say what kind of danger? If you value your life, you just give it a wide berth.”
Such conversations were frequent, but I knew well that they were useless. I only succeeded in delaying, what was sure to come. And Lilly never succeeded in changing in the least my opinion of her lover. Now,