ship, and kissed the lips of the bride. Amid a storm of
applause the curtain dropped, and as he led the blushing Ada away he
bent down, and pointing to the ring, whispered, "Wear it until some
future day, when, by replacing it, I shall make you really my little
wife."

The words were few and lightly spoken, but they touched the heart of
the young Ada, awakening within her thoughts and feelings of which she
never before had dreamed. Frequently, after that, she met St. Leon,
who sometimes teased her about being his wife; but when he saw how
painfully embarrassed she seemed on such occasions, he desisted.

The next year he was graduated, and the same day on which he received
the highest honors of his class was long remembered with heartfelt
sorrow, for ere the city clocks tolled the hour of midnight he stood
with his orphaned niece, Jenny, weeping over the inanimate form of his
sister, Mrs. Durant, who had died suddenly in a fit of apoplexy. Mr.
Durant had been dead some years, and as Jenny had now no relatives in
New Haven, she accompanied her uncle to his Southern home. Long and
passionately she wept on Ada's bosom as she bade her farewell,
promising never to forget her, but to write her three pages of
foolscap every week. To do Jenny justice, we must say that this
promise was faithfully kept for a whole month, and then, with
thousands of its sisterhood, it disappeared into the vale of broken
promises and resolutions.

She still wrote occasionally, and at the end of each epistle there was
always a long postscript from Hugh, which Ada prized almost as much as
she did Jenny's whole letter; and when at last matters changed, the
letter becoming Hugh's and the postscript Jenny's, she made no
objection, even if she felt any. At the time of her father's failure
and death, a long unanswered letter was lying in her portfolio, which
was entirely forgotten until weeks after, when, in the home which
Uncle Israel so _disinterestedly_ helped them to procure, she and her
mother were sewing for the food which they ate. Then a dozen times was
an answer commenced, blotted with tears, and finally destroyed, until
Ada, burying her face in her mother's lap, sobbed out, "Oh, mother, I
cannot do it. I cannot write to tell them how poor we are, for I
remember that Jenny was proud, and laughed at the schoolgirls whose
fathers were not rich."

So the letter was never answered, and as St. Leon about that time
started on a tour through Europe,