wisdom may force them into widely different ways of life; worldly
wisdom may delude them, or may make them delude themselves, into
contracting an earthly and a fallible union. It matters nothing.
The time will certainly come when that union will manifest itself
as earthly and fallible; and the two disunited spirits, finding
each other again, will become united here for the world beyond
this--united, I tell you, in defiance of all human laws and of
all human notions of right and wrong.

"This is my belief. I have proved it by my own life. Maid, wife,
and widow, I have held to it, and I have found it good.

"I was born, madam, in the rank of society to which you belong. I
received the mean, material teaching which fulfills the worldly
notion of education. Thanks be to God, my kindred spirit met _my_
spirit while I was still young. I knew true love and true union
before I was twenty years of age. I married, madam, in the rank
from which Christ chose his apostles--I married a laboring-man.
No human language can tell my happiness while we lived united
here. His death has not parted us. He helps me to write this
letter. In my last hours I shall see him standing among the
angels, waiting for me on the banks of the shining river.

"You will now understand the view I take of the tie which unites
the young spirits of our children at the bright outset of their
lives.

"Believe me, the thing which your husband's brother has proposed
to you to do is a sacrilege and a profanation. I own to you
freely that I look on what I have done toward thwarting your
relative in this matter as an act of virtue. You cannot expect
_me_ to think it a serious obstacle to a union predestined in
heaven, that your son is the squire's heir, and that my
grandchild is only the bailiff's daughter. Dismiss from your
mind, I implore you, the unworthy and unchristian prejudices of
rank. Are we not all equal before God? Are we not all equal (even
in this world) before disease and death? Not your son's happiness
only, but your own peace of mind, is concerned in taking heed to
my words. I warn you, madam, you cannot hinder the destined union
of these two child-spirits, in after-years, as man and wife. Part
them now--and YOU will be responsible for the sacrifices,
degradations and distresses through which your George and my Mary
may be condemned to pass on their way back to each other in later
life.

"Now my mind is unburdened. Now I have said all.

"If I have spoken too freely, or have in any other way
unwittingly offended, I ask your pardon, and remain, madam, your
faithful servant and well-wisher,
HELEN DERMODY."

So the letter ended.

To me it is something more than a mere curiosity of epistolary
composition. I see in it the prophecy--strangely fulfilled in
later years--of events in Mary's life, and in mine, which future
pages are now to tell.

My mother decided on leaving the letter unanswered. Like many of
her poorer neighbors, she was a little afraid of Dame Dermody;
and she was, besides, habitually averse to all discussions which
turned on the mysteries of spiritual life. I was reproved,
admonished, and forgiven; and there was the end of it.

For some happy weeks Mary and I returned, without hinderance or
interruption, to our old intimate companionship The end was
coming, however, when we least expected it. My mother was
startled, one morning, by a letter from my father, which informed
her that he had been unexpectedly obliged to sail for England at
a moment's notice; that he had arrived in London, and that he was
detained there by business which would admit of no delay. We were
to wait for him at home, in daily expectation of seeing him the
moment he was free.

This news filled my mother's mind with foreboding doubts of the
stability of her husband's grand speculation in America. The
sudden departure from the United States, and the mysterious delay
in London, were ominous, to her eyes, of misfortune to come. I am
now writing of those dark days in the past, when the railway and
the electric telegraph were still visions in the minds of
inventors. Rapid communication with my father (even if he would
have consented to take us into his confidence) was impossible. We
had no choice but to wait and hope.

The weary days passed; and still my father's brief letters
described him as detained by his business. The morning came when
Mary and I went out with Dermody, the bailiff, to see the last
wild fowl of the season lured into the decoy; and still the
welcome home waited for the master, and waited in vain.

CHAPTER III.

SWEDENBORG AND THE SIBYL.

MY narrative may move on again from the point at which it paused
in the first chapter.

Mary and I (as you may remember) had left the bailiff alone at
the decoy, and had set forth on our way together to Dermody's


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