"My dear Wife—" wrote David, "I hope you will try to understand what I am about to write and not think, for a moment, that I under-value the pleasure and help I have received from our correspondence, during the year and nine months which have elapsed since my departure from England. Your letters have been a greater cheer and blessing than you can possibly know. Also it has been an untold help to be able to write and share with you, all the little details of my interests out here.

"I am afraid these undeniable facts will make it seem even stranger to you, that I am now writing to ask that our correspondence should cease.

"I daresay you have noticed that my letters lately have been irregular, and often, I am afraid, short and unsatisfactory. The fact is—I have required all my remaining energy for the completion of my work out here.

"I want to bid you farewell, my wife, while I still have strength to write hopefully of my present work, and joyously of the future. I will not, now, hide from you, Diana, that my time here is nearly over. Do you remember how I said: 'I cannot promise to die, you know'? I might have promised, with a good grace, after all.

"This will be the last letter I shall write; and when you have answered it, do not write again. I may be moved from here, any day; and can give you no address.

"You must not suppose, my wife, that, owing to the ceasing of our correspondence, you will be left in any uncertainty as to when the merely nominal bond which has bound us together is severed, leaving you completely free.

"I have written you a letter, which I carry, sealed and addressed, in the breast pocket of my coat. It bears full instructions that it is to be forwarded to you immediately after my death. A copy of it is also in my despatch-box; so that—in case of anything unforeseen happening to my clothes—the letter would without fail be sent to you, so soon as my belongings came into the hands of our Society.

"This letter is not, therefore, my final farewell; so I do not make it anything of a good-bye; though it puts an end to our regular correspondence. And may I ask you to believe that there is a reason for this breaking off of our correspondence; a reason which I cannot feel free to tell you now; but which I have explained fully, in the letter you will receive after my death? If you now find this step somewhat difficult to understand, believe me, that when you have read my other letter, you will at once admit that I could not do otherwise. I would not give your generous heart a moment's pain; even through a misunderstanding.

"And now, from the bottom of my heart, may I thank you for all you have done for me and for my work? Any little service I was able to render you, was as nothing compared with all you have so generously done for me, and been to me, since the Feast of Epiphany, nearly two years ago.

"Your help has meant simply everything to the work out here. I am able to feel that I shall leave behind me a fully established, flourishing, growing, eager young Church. My colleague is a splendid fellow, keen, earnest, and a good churchman. If you feel able to continue your support, he will be most grateful, and I can vouch for him as did the Jews of old, for the Roman centurion: 'He is worthy, for whom thou shouldest do this thing.'

"And, oh, if some day, Diana, you yourself could visit the Church of the Holy Star! Some day; but not yet.

"For this brings me to the closing request of my letter.

"I cannot but suspect that your kind and generous heart may incline you—as soon as you receive this letter, and know that I am dying—to come out here at once, in order to bid a personal farewell to your friend.

"Do not do so. Do not leave England until you receive word of my death. I have a reason, which you will understand by and by, for laying special stress upon this request; in fact it is my last wish and command, my wife. (I have not had much opportunity for tyranny, have I?)

"How much your sympathy, and gay bright friendship, have meant to me, in this somewhat lonely life, no words can say.

"Just now I wrote of the time, so soon coming, when the nominal bond between us would be severed, leaving you completely free. You must not even feel yourself a widow, Diana; because you will not really be one. I have called you my 'wife,' I know; but it has just been a courtesy title. Has n't it?

"Yet—may I say it?—I trust and believe the very perfect friendship between us will be a lasting link, which even death cannot sever. And there is a yet closer bond: One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism. This is eternal.

"So—I say again as I said, with my hands on your bowed head, on that Christmas night so long ago, before we knew all that was to be between us:

"Good-bye, my wife.
"Yours ever,
"David Rivers."