he desire of
Elmore's old friends to have him once more in their midst, at the close
of labors which they were sure would do credit to the good old
university and to the whole city of Patmos.

Elmore read this letter at breakfast, and silently handed it to his
wife: they were alone, for Lily, as now often happened, had not yet
risen. "Well?" he said, when she had read it in her turn. She gave it
back to him with a look in her dimmed eyes which he could not mistake.
"I see there is no doubt of your feeling, Celia," he added.

"I don't wish to urge you," she replied, "but yes, I should like to go
back. Yes, I am homesick. I have been afraid of it before, but this
chance of returning makes it certain."

"And you see nothing ridiculous in my taking the presidency of a
military institute?"

"They say expressly that they don't expect you to give instruction in
that branch."

"No, not immediately, it seems," he said, with his pensive irony. "And
the history?"

"Haven't you almost got notes enough?"

Elmore laughed sadly. "I have been here two years. It would take me
twenty years to write such a history of Venice as I ought not to be
ashamed to write; it would take me five years to scamp it as I thought
of doing. Oh, I dare say I had better go back. I have neither the time
nor the money to give to a work I never was fit for,--of whose
magnitude even I was unable to conceive."

"Don't say that!" cried his wife, with the old sympathy. "You will write
it yet, I know you will. I would rather spend all my days in
this--watery mausoleum than have you talk so, Owen!"

"Thank you, my dear; but the work won't be lost even if I give it up at
this point. I can do something with my material, I suppose. And you know
that if I didn't _wish_ to give up my project I couldn't. It's a sign of
my unfitness for it that I'm able to abandon it. The man who is born to
write the history of Venice will have no volition in the matter: he
cannot leave it, and he will not die till he has finished it." He feebly
crushed a bit of bread in his fingers as he ended with this burst of
feeling, and he shook his head in sad negation to his wife's tender
protest,--"Oh, you will come back some day to finish it!"

"No one ever comes back to finish a history of Venice," he said.

"Oh, yes, you will," she returned. "But you need the rest from this kind
of work, now, just as you needed rest from your college work before. You
need a change of standpoint,--