race of him ends at
that hotel in New York; I never have seen or heard of him since,
up to this day; he could hardly have sailed, for his name does not
appear upon the books of any shipping office in New York or Boston
or Baltimore. How fortunate it seems, now, that we kept this thing
to ourselves; Laura still has a father in you, and it is better for
her that we drop this subject here forever."

That was all. Random remarks here and there, being pieced together gave
Laura a vague impression of a man of fine presence, abort forty-three or
forty-five years of age, with dark hair and eyes, and a slight limp in
his walk--it was not stated which leg was defective. And this indistinct
shadow represented her father. She made an exhaustive search for the
missing letters, but found none. They had probably been burned; and she
doubted not that the ones she had ferreted out would have shared the same
fate if Mr. Hawkins had not been a dreamer, void of method, whose mind
was perhaps in a state of conflagration over some bright new speculation
when he received them.

She sat long, with the letters in her lap, thinking--and unconsciously
freezing. She felt like a lost person who has traveled down a long lane
in good hope of escape, and, just as the night descends finds his
progress barred by a bridge-less river whose further shore, if it has
one, is lost in the darkness. If she could only have found these letters
a month sooner! That was her thought. But now the dead had carried
their secrets with them. A dreary, melancholy settled down upon her.
An undefined sense of injury crept into her heart. She grew very
miserable.

She had just reached the romantic age--the age when there is a sad
sweetness, a dismal comfort to a girl to find out that there is a mystery
connected with her birth, which no other piece of good luck can afford.
She had more than her rightful share of practical good sense, but still
she was human; and to be human is to have one's little modicum of romance
secreted away in one's composition. One never ceases to make a hero of
one's self, (in private,) during life, but only alters the style of his
heroism from time to time as the drifting years belittle certain gods of
his admiration and raise up others in their stead that seem greater.

The recent wearing days and nights of watching, and the wasting grief
that had possessed her, combined with the profound depression that