After weeks of barrenness, of stray post-cards and perfunctory notes, these ample pages, with their rhetorical and sentimental effusion, brought new life to the fretting, lonely woman.

She went about in penitence.
Surely she had done injustice to her John; and she dreaded lest any inkling of those foolish or morbid thoughts she had been harbouring should ever reach him.
She wrote back with passion--like one throwing herself on his breast.
The letter was long and incoherent, written at night beside Carrie's bed--and borrowing much, unconsciously, from the phraseology of the novels she still got from Bowness.

Alack! it is to be feared that John Fenwick--already at another point in spiritual space when the letter reached him--gave it but a hasty reading.
But, for the time, it was an untold relief to the writer.

Afterwards, she settled down to wait again, working meanwhile night and day at her beautiful embroidery that John had designed for her.

Miss Anna came to see her, exclaimed at her frail looks, wanted to lend her money.
Phoebe in a new exaltation, counting the weeks, and having still three or four sovereigns in the drawer, refused--would say nothing about their straits.