No, my love, suffer him not to do it. Let nothing more be done. I had rather abide my full term of punishment. It is only too easy.
Do not grieve for me. Trust me, my child, many a peer puts on his robes with a heavier heart than I put on this felon's dress, which shocked Granton so much that he is sure to tell you of it. Never mind it—my clothes are not me, are they, little lady? Who was the man that wrote:—
“Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage,
Minds innocent—”
Am I innocent? No, but I am forgiven, as I believe, before God and man. And are not all the glories of heaven preparing, not for sinless but for pardoned souls?
Therefore, I am at peace. This first night of my imprisonment is, for some things, as happy to me as that which I have often imagined to myself, when I should bring you home for the first time to my own fireside.
Not even that thought, and the rush of thoughts that came with it, are able to shake me out of this feeling of unutterable rest: so perfect that it seems strange to imagine I shall ever go out of this cell to begin afresh the turmoil of the world—as strange as that the dead should wish to return again to life and its cares. But this as God wills.
My love, good night. Granton will give you any further particulars. Talk to him freely—it will be his good heart's best reward. His happy, busy life, which is now begun, may have been made all the brighter for the momentary cloud which taught him that Providence oftentimes blesses us in better ways than by giving us exactly the thing we desired. He told me when we parted, which was the only allusion he made to the past—that though Mrs. Colin was “the dearest little woman in all the world,” he should always adore as “something between a saint and an angel,” Miss Dora.
Is she my saint and angel? Perhaps—if she were not likewise the woman of my love.