"God for ever bless you, Loisette, the one
and only woman in His earth for me!"

"And God bless you, and comfort you," she
said. " I wish I could have been a better friend
to you—I meant to be. Always believe that."

"I will, I do."

And so Loisette and I parted. The May
morning was darkened as I passed through the
garden gate again. I turned my steps I knew
not whither—away, away, where no one could
see me. That was the only wish or instinct I
had.

I walked miles, seeking rest, and finding none.
At last I stopped at a gate, and leaned my arms
on it, and looked blindly over the wide landscape
spread before me.

As I gazed, a dull numbness fell on my sorrow,
and my perceptions of outward objects
slowly returned.

I watched some children gathering blossoms
of the May, and thought what a pity it was
they should tear the boughs down so, and
destroy so much to secure so little. I watched
a stealthy cat creeping through the long
undulations of the grass, on the hunt for the poor
little tender young rabbits. Up sprang a
lark, bursting into ripples of song, and my eye
followed him, rising, hovering, rising again,
pausing, balancing on the wing, soaring up once
more, darting away obliquely, resting awhile,
but always singing—singing as if he could not
cease for his life—then dashing down like a stone
and vanishing.

And then my great grief seized me once more,
and I dropped on the turf and hid my face in
my arms, and cried as I had never cried since I
was a boy, when my mother died, and when I
thought the world held no more happiness for me.

When our great griefs fall on us, we treat
them as boys do bonfires. It seems that they
cannot burn fiercely enough; we heap on them
everything that comes to our hand in the way
of fuel; all the tenderest recollections, all the
sweetest hopes, all the most blessed anticipations,
that made the joy and glory of our lives—
that were as wings, lifting us above the earth
we trod on. All these are brought out from the
storehouse of memory and thrown on the pile,
making it blaze with inextinguishable fury,
or what seems to us so, and we feel a bitter
relish in the anguish, and seek to make it
more, rather than less, as we stir the heap into
fiercer conflagration.

Ah me! Ah me! what a miserable fool I had
been, and how was I punished!

I had thought, when in my hopefulness that
morning I had contemplated the whole affair,
that I had been prepared for this possibility,
and could bear it. But, strangely, it had
never entered into my calculations that if
Loisette were not for me, it could be that she
was promised to another; there was the
sting, the thing so impossible to endure without
every fibre of my heart being torn by the agonies
of jealousy, in addition to grief. Loisette
engaged, Loisette with no love for me, all her love
for another! Loisette thinking of him, writing
to him, calling him all those tender names that
lips like hers seemed made to utter! And in
August—in three months—he was coming back,
doubtless to claim his bride!

At that thought I sprang up, as if a serpent
had arisen from the green turf and stung me.
I started away so far that it was not till dark
that, utterly worn out and exhausted, I reached
home. I shall never forget that night, nor the
waking in the morning, after a couple of hours'
dead sleep.

That day I wrote to my cousin, Sir Edward
Haldane, who had just been appointed governor
of New Brunswick, to offer myself as his
private secretary: a post he had suggested my
taking when his nomination to the place had first
been talked of. The answer came. He would
be delighted; in less than a fortnight I left
England.

"I am so grieved," Mrs. Hamilton had
written before this, "so grieved in every way."
I had not been wrong, then, in fancying I had
had her good wishes. "I should have been so
glad to have bidden you God speed by word
of mouth before you went, but I feel I ought
not to ask you to come. Anyway, you have
our best wishes, now and ever." Not a word
from Loisette. Well, better so. What could
she say?

I often look back now on my sojourn in that
black miserable raw colony, ice-bound for half
the year, sun-scorched for a few weeks, with
something like a shudder.

The great cold staring barrack of a Government
House, with its flat unshaded gardens; the
unpicturesque village that was the seat of
government, and prided itself accordingly; the
country that was nothing but dense forest, bare
clearing, studded with blackened stumps or
quaking morass! The interminable winter,
white, still, silent, fettered with a frost that was
unrelenting as death, that chilled the blood and
nipped the flesh into blains, and checked the
current of life in the veins of childhood, of
age, and of all tender beings!

Oh, the desolation of those winter forests!
No tongue can tell it! No breeze, no voice
of bird, no rustle of leaf, no colour; a
broad white floor, a hard blue roof, black stiff
iron trees standing up motionless and stark.
All so like my own life in desolateness! only
this nature felt no pain!

I stayed there till the sickly tardy spring,
often driven back by fresh snow-falls, came to
loosen the spell that winter had laid on the
suffering land, and then I resolved to bear it
no longer, and, come what might, to return to
England, and learn tidings of Loisette. It
seemed to me that anything would be more
endurable than this dead silence regarding her.

So I turned my back on New Brunswick for
evermore, and reached England in March;
March, wild and gusty, but at least alive with
birds singing, and grass and buds upshooting in
field and hedgerow.

I went at once into Hertfordshire. I dared
not go to Mrs. Hamilton's; I dared not ask