certain
evening long, long ago. I wonder if you remember it as plainly as
I do. I am just the same fellow that I was then and there. If you
remember, you admitted that, were it not for other duties, you might
have considered my humble supplication. I gathered that it would not
have been impossible _per se_, as metaphysicians say, to look with
favor on your humble servant.

"Gracie, I have been living, I trust, not unworthily of you. Your
photograph has been with me round the world,--in the miner's tent,
on shipboard, among scenes where barbarous men do congregate; and
everywhere it has been a presence, 'to warn, to comfort, to command;'
and if I have come out of many trials firmer, better, more established
in right than before; if I am more believing in religion, and in every
way grounded and settled in the way you would have me,--it has been
your spiritual presence and your power over me that has done it.
Besides that, I may as well tell you, I have never given up the hope
that by and by you would see all this, and in some hour give me a
different answer.

"When, therefore, I learned of your father's death, and afterwards of
John's marriage, I thought it was time for me to return again. I have
come to New York, and, if you do not forbid, shall come to Springdale.

"Will you be a little glad to see me, Gracie? Why not? We are both
alone now. Let us take hands, and walk the same path together. Shall
we?

"Yours till death, and after,

"WALTER SYDENHAM."

Would she? To say the truth, the question as asked now had a very
different air from the question as asked years before, when, full of
life and hope and enthusiasm, she had devoted herself to making
an ideal home for her father and brother. What other sympathy or
communion, she had asked herself then, should she ever need than these
friends, so very dear: and, if she needed more, there, in the future,
was John's ideal wife, who, somehow, always came before her in the
likeness of Rose Ferguson, and John's ideal children, whom she was
sure she should love and pet as if they were her own.

And now here she was, in a house all by herself, coming down to her
meals, one after another, without the excitement of a cheerful face
opposite to her, and with all possibility of confidential intercourse
with her brother entirely cut off. Lillie, in this matter, acted, with
much grace and spirit, the part of the dog in the manger; and, while
she resolutely refused to enter in