upon her ear.

"I shall not see you for a long time to come, Bertha," said he, "but if
at the end of five or six years your hand is still free, and I
return another man--a man to whom you could safely intrust your
happiness--would you then listen to what I may have to say to you? For I
promise, by all that we both hold sacred--"

"No, no," interrupted she, hastily. "Promise nothing. It would be unjust
to yourself, and perhaps also to me; for a sacred promise is a terrible
thing, Ralph. Let us both remain free; and, if you return and still love
me, then come, and I shall receive you and listen to you. And even if
you have outgrown your love, which is, indeed, more probable, come still
to visit me wherever I may be, and we shall meet as friends and rejoice
in the meeting."

"You know best," he murmured. "Let it be as you have said."

He arose, took her face between his hands, gazed long and tenderly into
her eyes, pressed a kiss upon her forehead, and hastened away.

That night Ralph boarded the steamer for Hull, and three weeks later
landed in New York.

IV

The first three months of Ralph's sojourn in America were spent in vain
attempts to obtain a situation. Day after day he walked down Broadway,
calling at various places of business, and night after night he returned
to his cheerless room with a faint heart and declining spirits. It was,
after all, a more serious thing than he had imagined, to cut the cable
which binds one to the land of one's birth. There a hundred subtile
influences, the existence of which no one suspects until the moment they
are withdrawn, unite to keep one in the straight path of rectitude, or
at least of external respectability; and Ralph's life had been all in
society; the opinion of his fellow-men had been the one force to which
he implicitly deferred, and the conscience by which he had been wont
to test his actions had been nothing but the aggregate judgment of his
friends. To such a man the isolation and the utter irresponsibility of a
life among strangers was tenfold more dangerous; and Ralph found, to his
horror, that his character contained innumerable latent possibilities
which the easy-going life in his home probably never would have revealed
to him. It often cut him to the quick, when, on entering an office in
his daily search for employment, he was met by hostile or suspicious
glances, or when, as it occasionally happened, the door was slammed in
his face, as if he were