"You know I left you wholly free. Others must have seen your loveliness
and felt your worth; and you may have learnt to love some better man
than me. But I know not what hope tells me that this will not be; and I
shall find true what the Bible says of love, that 'many waters cannot
quench it, nor floods drown.' In any case, I shall be always, from my
very heart, yours, and yours only.

"JAMES MARVYN."

Mary rose, after reading this letter, rapt into a divine state of
exaltation,--the pure joy, in contemplating an infinite good to
another, in which the question of self was utterly forgotten.

He was, then, what she had always hoped and prayed he would be, and she
pressed the thought triumphantly to her heart. He was that true and
victorious man, that Christian able to subdue life, and to show, in a
perfect and healthy manly nature, a reflection of the image of the
superhuman excellence. Her prayers that night were aspirations and
praises, and she felt how possible it might be so to appropriate the
good and the joy and the nobleness of others as to have in them an
eternal and satisfying treasure. And with this came the dearer thought,
that she, in her weakness and solitude, had been permitted to put her
hand to the beginning of a work so noble. The consciousness of good
done to an immortal spirit is wealth that neither life nor death can
take away.

And so, having prayed, she lay down to that sleep which God giveth to
his beloved.