Letter III

resignation. > > To those once connected with him, who are now no more, I need not and cannot refer again. That part of the dreary past with which they are associated, is the part which I still shrink in terror from thinking on. There are two names which my lips have not uttered for years; which, in this life, I shall never pronounce again. The night of Death is over them: a night to look away from forevermore. > > To look away from⁠—but, towards what object? The future? That way, I see but dimly even yet. It is on the present that my thoughts are fixed, in the contentment which desires no change. > > For the last five months I have lived here with Clara⁠—here, on the little estate which was once her mother’s, which is now hers. Long before my father’s death we often talked, in the great country house, of future days which we might pass together, as we pass them now, in this place. Though we may often leave it for a time, we shall always look back to Lanreath Cottage as to our home. The years of retirement which I spent at the Hall, after my recovery, have not awakened in me a single longing to return to the busy world. Ralph⁠—now the head of our family; now aroused by his new duties to a sense of his new position⁠—Ralph, already emancipated from many of the habits which once enthralled and degraded him, has written, bidding me employ to the utmost the resources which his position enables him to offer me, if I decide on entering into public life. But I have no such purpose; I am still resolved to live on in obscurity, in retirement, in peace. I have suffered too much; I have been wounded too sadly, to range myself with