It had been left for me to watch her dying moments; it was left for me
to bestow on her remains the last human charity which the living can
extend to the dead. If I could have looked into the future on our
fatal marriage-day, and could have known that the only home of my
giving which she would ever inhabit, would be the home of the grave!--
Her father had written me a letter, which I destroyed at the time; and
which, if I had it now, I should forbear from copying into these
pages. Let it be enough for me to relate here, that he never forgave
the action by which she thwarted him in his mercenary designs upon me
and upon my family; that he diverted from himself the suspicion and
disgust of his wife's surviving relatives (whose hostility he had some
pecuniary reasons to fear), by a
