What agonies of conscience it must have cost these two good souls
thus to conspire together for benevolence, none ever knew. Nor was
it less pathetic that the fraud was so hollow and transparent.
I doubt not that the sin of it was washed out with self-reproving
tears, and cannot think that they were shed in vain.

So the seasons passed, and we waited, till in the late summer of 1849
(my father having been away nineteen months) there came another
letter to say that he was about to start for home. He had found what
he sought, so he said, but could not rightly understand its value,
or, indeed, make head or tail of it by himself, and dared not ask
strangers to help him. Perhaps, however, when he came home, Jasper
(who was such a scholar) would help him; and maybe the key would be
some aid. For the rest, he had been stricken with a fever--a malady
common enough in those parts--but was better, and would start in
something over a week, in the _Belle Fortune_, a barque of some 650
tons register, homeward bound with a cargo of sugar, spices, and
coffee, and having a crew of about eighteen hands, with, he thought,
one or two passengers. The letter was full of strong hope and love,
so that my mother, who trembled a little when she read about the
fever, plucked up courage to smile again towards the close. The ship
would be due about October, or perhaps November. So once more we had
to resume our weary waiting, but this time with glad hearts, for we
knew that before Christmas the days of anxiety and yearning would be
over.

The long summer drew to a glorious and golden September, and so
faded away in a veil of grey sky; and the time of watching was nearly
done. Through September the skies had been without cloud, and the
sea almost breathless, but with the coming of October came dirty