, under any difficulty or error, small or great, you will write to me as you would have done to your own beloved mother, and I shall have no fear remaining."

Edward did promise, but his heart was so full he could not restrain himself any longer, and as Mrs. Hamilton folded him to her heart, in a silent but tearful embrace, he wept on her shoulder like a child.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE BIRTHDAY GIFT.

Brightly and placidly, as the course of their own beautiful river, did the days now pass to the inmates of Oakwood. Letters came from Edward so frequently, so happily, that hope would rest calmly, joyously, even on the thought of him. He never let an opportunity pass, writing always to Mrs. Hamilton (which he had scarcely ever done before), and inclosing his letters to Ellen open in hers. The tone, the frequency, were so changed from his last, that his family now wondered they had been so blind before in not perceiving that his very seeming liveliness was unnatural and overstrained.

With Ellen, too, Mrs. Hamilton's anxious care was bringing in fair promise of success—the mistaken influences of her childhood, and their increased effect from a morbid imagination, produced from constant suffering, appearing, indeed, about to be wholly eradicated. Anxious to remove all sad associations connected with the library, Mrs. Hamilton having determined herself to superintend Ellen's studies, passed long mornings in that ancient room with her, so delightfully, that it became associated only with the noble authors whose works, or extracts from whom, she read and reveled in, and which filled her mind with such new thoughts, such expansive ideas, such calming and earnest truths, that she felt becoming to herself a new being. Lively and thoughtless as Emmeline she could not now indeed become—alike as their dispositions naturally were; but she was more quietly, enduringly happy than she had ever remembered her self.

There was only one alloy, one sad thought, that would intrude causing a resolution, which none suspected; for, open as she had become, she could breathe it to none but Ellis, for she alone could assist her, though it required many persuasions and many assurances, that she never could be quite happy, unless it was accomplished, which could prevail on her to grant it. Ellen knew, felt, more and more each week, that she could not rest till she had labored for and obtained, and returned into her aunt's hands the full sum she had so involuntarily appropriated. The only means she
