ce soothed.

Meantime Maurice had reached Dresden and was searching for Madeleine,
almost in the same vague, unreasonable manner that he had sought her in
Paris. But the mad course upon which he had again started, and which
might have once more unbalanced his mind, met with a sudden check. The
day after his arrival in Dresden he received a note, which ran thus:--

"Madeleine is not in Dresden. She entreats Maurice to
discontinue a search which must prove fruitless. Should the
day ever come, as she prays it may, when her place of refuge
can become known to him, no effort of his will be required
for its discovery. Will not Maurice accept the pains of the
inevitable present and wait for the consolations the future
may bring forth with the hope and patience which must
sustain her until that blessed period shall arrive?"

Maurice was almost stupefied as he read these lines. He crushed the
paper in his nervous fingers to be certain that it was tangible; he
compared the writing with the one upon the envelope which he had taken
from Bertha. If that were Madeleine's hand, so was this. He looked for a
postmark; there was none; the letter had been brought by a private
messenger, and yet Madeleine was not in Dresden! How could this be?
That, in some mysterious manner, she became acquainted with his
movements was unquestionable. Her thoughts then were turned to him,--her
invisible presence followed him. It was some joy, at least, to know that
he lived in her memory.

Maurice, without a moment's hesitation, without letting his own personal
suffering weigh in the balance of decision, without allowing his mind to
dwell upon the probabilities of tracing Madeleine through this new clew,
resolved to comply with her request.

When he returned to Paris and placed her letter in Bertha's hands, and
told her his determination, she impetuously urged him not to be guided
by their cousin's wishes. She pleaded that Madeleine was sacrificing
herself from a mistaking sense of duty; that, if her place of abode
could only be revealed, Bertha's own supplications might influence her
to abandon her present project, and to accept the home which Bertha,
with the full consent of her uncle, could offer.

Maurice listened not unmoved, but unshaken, in his selected course. He
felt that a woman of Madeleine's dignity of character,--a woman of her
calm judgment,--a woman who could look with such steady, tearless eyes