Milly nodded. "But Jesus did it for us," she said; "He came when the people were wicked and cruel to Him, and we ought to be like Him—meek and lowly in heart."
Milly had put it before him now in the most convincing manner. He had been striving for some time to follow the example of the Saviour; but he had failed to see before that, this meekness and lowliness—this lowering of his pride—this voluntarily humbling of himself—was included in the service he was seeking to render. But seeing it, he would not now shrink from it, hard as it was.
The next day he wrote to his cousin—wrote as Milly had suggested—a kind, loving epistle, in which the past was referred to with humility and contrition, and a hope expressed that the writer might be forgiven for what he had done in a moment of passion.
There was but a slender chance of its ever reaching the hand for which it was intended, and Dr. Mansfield said this to himself again and again. So many things might have happened during all these years to take his cousin away from the spot where he had first settled, even if he were still alive. And yet the doctor could not help indulging a slight hope that his letter would be responded to. And from that time it seemed as if a weight was lifted from his mind, and a cloud from his brow—a weight that at one time he had thought he must always carry with him as long as he lived.
[CHAPTER IX.]
MAJOR FERRERS.
THE arrival of the European mail is always a welcome event at an East India station. Officers and soldiers look out as eagerly for letters from home as their wives do, and are as bitterly disappointed if they are overlooked in the general distribution, although they may not care to show it as much.
It was now just expected at Delhi, and Major Ferrers, with his wife, was eagerly looking through the half-closed lattices of the bungalow to watch for the well-known signal of its arrival.
"There, it's no use looking any longer," said the lady at length, in a fretful, petulant tone, throwing herself on a lounge. "It won't come any the sooner for our looking, and I dare say when it does come, there will be nothing for us."
"I hope there will. I am expecting a letter from the agent I have set to work in London."