d not. We are all
very well, and send you our best wishes. I am very much obliged for
the pretty work-box, and the magazines, etc. And I am, dear Mr.
Gilbert, with the most affectionate sentiments,

"NORINE K. BOURDON.

"P. S.--The gentleman is greatly better. He is with us still. He is
very nice. He is from your city.

"N."

In the solitude of his legal sanctum, Richard Gilbert, with frowning
brow and gloomy eyes, read this blighting epistle. His worst fears were
realized, more than realized.

There was a gentleman in the case. A gentleman who absorbed so much of
Miss Norine Bourdon's time that she could not answer his letters. And he
was "greatly better" and he was from your city. Confound the puppy! He
was young and good-looking, no doubt; and he must meet with his
accident, at her very door; precisely as though he were enacting a
chapter out of a novel. Of course, too, it was his arm and his ankle
that were smashed, not his villainous face. And Norine sat by his
bedside, and bathed his forehead, and held cooling draughts to his
parched lips, and listened to his romantic, imbecile delirium, etc.,
etc., etc. She sat up with him nights; she read to him; she talked to
him; she sang for him. He could see it all.

Mr. Gilbert was a Christian gentleman, so he did not swear. But I am
bound to say he felt like swearing. He jumped up; he crushed that poor
little letter into a ball; he strode up and down his office like a caged
(legal) tiger. The green-eyed monster put forth its obnoxious claws,
and never left him for many a dreary year. It was that atrocious
postscript, so innocently written, so diabolical to read. "He is greatly
better. He is with us still. He is very nice." Oh, confound him! what a
pity it had not been his neck.

Suddenly he paused in his walk, his brows knit, his eyes flashing, his
mouth set. Yes, that was it, he would do it, his resolution was taken.
He would go straight to Kent Farm, and see for himself. And next morning
at 8 o'clock the express train for Boston bore among its passengers Mr.
R. Gilbert, of New York.

The train whirled him away, and as the chill, murky December landscape
flew by, he awoke all at once to a sense of what he was about. Why was
he going? what did he mean? to ask Norine Bourdon to be his wife?
certainly not. To play dog in