THREE days after my mother and I had established ourselves at
Torquay, I received Mrs. Van Brandt's answer to my letter. After
the opening sentences (informing me that Van Brandt had been set
at liberty, under circumstances painfully suggestive to the
writer of some unacknowledged sacrifice on my part), the letter
proceeded in these terms:

"The new employment which Mr. Van Brandt is to undertake secures
to us the comforts, if not the luxuries, of life. For the first
time since my troubles began, I have the prospect before me of a
peaceful existence, among a foreign people from whom all that is
false in my position may be concealed--not for my sake, but for
the sake of my child. To more than this, to the happiness which
some women enjoy, I must not, I dare not, aspire.

"We leave England for the Continent early tomorrow morning. Shall
I tell you in what part of Europe my new residence is to be?

"No! You might write to me again; and I might write back. The one
poor return I can make to the good angel of my life is to help
him to forget me. What right have I to cling to my usurped place
in your regard? The time will come when you will give your heart
to a woman who is worthier of it than I am. Let me drop out of
your life--except as an occasional remembrance, when you
sometimes think of the days that have gone forever.

"I shall not be without some consolation on my side, when I too
look back at the past. I have been a better woman since I met
with you. Live as long as I may, I shall always remember that.

"Yes! The influence that you have had over me has been from first
to last an influence for good. Allowing that I have done wrong
(in my position) to love you, and, worse even than that, to own
it, still the love has been innocent, and the effort to control
it has been an honest effort at least. But, apart from this, my
heart tells me that I am the better for the sympathy which has
united us. I may confess to you what I have never yet
acknowledged--now that we are so widely parted, and so little
likely to meet again--whenever I have given myself up
unrestrainedly to my own better impulses, they have always seemed
to lead me to you. Whenever my mind has been most truly at peace,
and I have been able to pray with a pure and a penitent heart, I
have felt as if there was some unseen tie that was drawing us
nearer and nearer together. And, strange to say, this has always
happened (just as my dreams of you have always come to me) when I
have been separated from Van Brandt. At such times, thinking or
dreaming, it has always appeared to me that I knew you far more
familiarly than I know you when we meet face to face. Is there
really such a thing, I wonder, as a former state of existence?
And were we once constant companions in some other sphere,
thousands of years since? These are idle guesses. Let it be
enough for me to remember that I have been the better for knowing
you--without inquiring how or why.

"Farewell, my beloved benefactor, my only friend! The child sends
you a kiss; and the mother signs herself your grateful and
affectionate

M. VAN BRANDT."

When I first read those lines, they once more recalled to my
memory--very strangely, as I then thought--the predictions of
Dame Dermody in the days of my boyhood. Here were the foretold
sympathies which were spiritually to unite me to Mary, realized
by a stranger whom I had met by chance in the later years of my
life!

Thinking in this direction, did I advance no further? Not a step
further! Not a suspicion of the truth presented itself to my mind
even yet.

Was my own dullness of apprehension to blame for this? Would
another man in my position have discovered what I had failed to
see?

I look back along the chain of events which runs through my
narrative, and I ask myself, Where are the possibilities to be
found (in my case, or in the case of any other man) of
identifying the child who was Mary Dermody with the woman who was
Mrs. Van Brandt? Was there anything left in our faces, when we
met again by the Scotch river, to remind us of our younger
selves? We had developed, in the interval, from boy and girl to
man and woman: no outward traces were discernible in us of the
George and Mary of other days. Disguised from each other by our
faces, we were also disguised by our names. Her mock-marriage had
changed her surname. My step-father's will had changed mine. Her
Christian name was the commonest of all names of women; and mine
was almost as far from being remarkable among the names of men.
Turning next to the various occasions
on which we had met, had we seen enough of each other to drift
into recognition on either side, in the ordinary course of talk?
We had met but four times in all; once on the bridge, once again
in Edinburgh, twice more in London. On each of these occasions,
the absorbing anxieties and interests of the passing moment had
filled her mind and mine, had inspired her words and mine. When
had the events which had brought us together left us with leisure
enough and tranquillity enough to look back idly through our
lives, and calmly to compare the recollections of our youth?
Never! From first to last, the course of events had borne us


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