"Leave me, my dear Lord—leave me to this quiet happy passage towards old age, serener than the youth that I wasted so wildly: and guard well the secret on which my happiness depends.
"Now to yourself, before I close. Of that same yourself you speak too little, as of me too much. But I so well comprehend the profound melancholy that lies underneath the wild and fanciful humor with which you but suggest, as in sport, what you feel so in earnest. The laborious solitude of cities weighs on you. You are flying back to the dolce far niente—to friends few, but intimate; to life monotonous, but unrestrained; and even there the sense of loneliness will again seize upon you; and you do not seek, as I do, the annihilation of memory; your dead passions are turned to ghosts that haunt you, and unfit you for the living world. I see it all—I see it still, in your hurried fantastic lines, as I saw it when we two sat amidst the pines and beheld the blue lake stretched below. I troubled by the shadow of the Future, you disturbed by that of the Past.
"Well, but you say, half-seriously, half in jest, 'I will escape from this prison-house of memory; I will form new ties, like other men, and before it be too late; I will marry—aye, but I must love—there is the difficulty'—difficulty—yes, and heaven be thanked for it! Recall all the unhappy marriages that have come to your knowledge—pray have not eighteen out of twenty been marriages for love? It always has been so, and it always will. Because, whenever we love deeply, we exact so much and forgive so little. Be content to find some one with whom your hearth and your honor are safe. You will grow to love what never wounds your heart—you will soon grow out of love with what must always disappoint your imagination. Cospetto! I wish my Jemima had a younger sister for you. Yet it was with a deep groan that I settled myself to a—Jemima.
"Now, I have written you a long letter, to prove how little I need of your compassion or your zeal. Once more let there be long silence between us. It is not easy for me to correspond with a man of your rank, and not incur the curious gossip of my still little pool of a world which the splash of a pebble can break into circles. I must take this over to a post-town some ten miles off, and drop it into the box by stealth.
"Adieu, dear and noble friend, gentlest heart and subtlest fancy that I have met in my walk through life. Adieu—write me word when you have abandoned a day-dream and found a Jemima.
Alphonso.
"P. S.—For heaven's sake caution and re-caution your friend the minister, not to drop a word to this woman that may betray my hiding-place."
"Is he really happy?" murmured Harley as he closed the letter; and he sank for a few moments into a reverie.
"This life in a village—this wife in a lady who puts down her work to talk about villagers—what a contrast to Audley's full existence. And I can never envy nor comprehend either—yet my own—what is it?"
He rose, and moved towards the window, from which a rustic stair descended to a green lawn—studded with larger trees than are often found in the grounds of a suburban residence. There were calm and coolness in the sight, and one could scarcely have supposed that London lay so near.