The Letter Received

"I cannot let my darling take cold," he said, and Lucy felt a strange
thrill of joy, for never before had he called her his darling, and
sometimes she had thought that the love she received was not as great
as the love she gave.

But she did not think so now, and in an ecstasy of joy she stood in
the deep recess of the bay window, watching him as he went away
through the moonlight and the feathery cloud of snow, wondering why,
when she was so happy, there could cling to her a haunted presentiment
that she and Arthur would never meet again just as they had parted.

Arthur, on the contrary, was troubled with no such presentiment. Of
Anna he hardly thought, or, if he did, the vision was obscured by the
fair picture he had seen standing in the door, with the snowflakes
resting in her hair like pearls in a golden coronet. And Arthur
thanked his God that he was beginning at last to feel right--that the
solemn vows that he was so soon to utter would be more than a mockery.

It was Arthur's work to teach others how dark and mysterious are the
ways of Providence, but he had not himself half learned that lesson in
all its strange reality; but the lesson was coming on apace; each
stride of his swift-footed beast brought him nearer to the great shock
waiting for him upon the study table, where Thomas, his man, had put
it.

He saw it the first thing on entering the room, but he did not take
it up until the snow was brushed from his garments and he had warmed
himself by the cheerful fire blazing on the hearth. Then, sitting in
his easy-chair, and moving the lamp nearer to him, he took Mrs.
Meredith's letter and broke the seal, starting as if a serpent had
stung him when, in the note inclosed, he recognized his own
handwriting, the same he had sent to Anna when his heart was so full
of hope as the brown stalks now beating against his windows with a
dismal sound were full of fragrant blossoms. Both had died since
then--the roses and his hopes--And Arthur almost wished that he, too,
were dead when he read Mrs. Meredith's letter and saw the gulf his
feet were treading. Like the waves of the sea, his love for Anna came
rolling back upon him, augmented and intensified by all that he had
suffered, and by the terrible conviction that it could not be,
although, alas! "it might have been."