Read it through once

“I cannot suffer you to leave our neighbourhood for weeks, perhaps for months, without making one more effort to soften a displeasure too justly excited—without once more acknowledging my fault, and entreating your forgiveness. Do not again repulse me—pray do not! Life is too short, too full of calamity, for an alienation indefinitely prolonged—a pardon so long suspended. I know you better, perhaps, than you know yourself, and am sure that, were I at this moment suffering under any great affliction, you would be the first—ay, the very first—to soothe and to succour me. If my father (which may God in his mercy avert!) were dead; if I myself were on a sick bed, or in prison, or in a workhouse (and you well know that this is the destiny to which I always look forward), then you would come to me—I am sure of it. You would be as ready to fly to my assistance then as the angel of peace and mercy at your side”—[a tender allusion to Mrs. Merry, who was deeply grieved at the estrangement].—“But do not wait for that moment; do not, for an error which has been sincerely and severely repented, deprive a melancholy and a most anxious existence of one of its few consolations. Lonely and desolate as I am—with no one belonging to me in the world but my dear father—poor in every sense, earning with pain and difficulty a livelihood which every day makes more precarious, I cannot afford the loss of your sympathy. I say this without fear of misconstruction. You will understand that what I regret is the friendship, and intimacy, the everyday intercourse of mind and of heart, on which even you yourself—so much more happily placed—did yet set some value. You did like me once; try me again. You will find me—at least I hope so—all the better for the rigorous discipline which my mind has lately undergone, the salutary and unwonted course of self-examination and self-abasement.