ree or four months. You see, I tell you the worst at once,
Mary, because I know your courage and high spirit, and feel sure that
you will bear up bravely against this unforeseen parting, for both our
sakes. How glad I am that I gave you my hair for your Bracelet, when I
did; and that I got yours in return! It will be such a consolation to
both of us to have our keepsakes to look at now.

"If it only rested with _me_ to go or not, no earthly consideration
should induce me to take this journey. But the rights and interests of
others are concerned in my setting forth; and I must, therefore, depart
at the expense of my own wishes, and my own happiness. I go this very
day, and can only steal a few minutes to write to you. My pen hurries
over the paper without stopping an instant--I am so agitated that I
hardly know what I am saying to you.

"If anything, dearest Mary, could add to my sense of the misfortune of
being obliged to leave you, it would be the apprehension which I now
feel, that I may have ignorantly offended you, or that something has
happened which you don't like to tell me. Ever since I noticed, ten days
ago, that little alteration in your manner, I have been afraid you had
something on your mind that you were unwilling to confide to me. The
very last time we saw each other I thought you had been crying; and I
am sure you looked away uneasily, whenever our eyes met. What is it? Do
relieve my anxiety by telling me what it is in your first letter! The
moment I get to the other side of the Channel, I will send you word,
where to direct to. I will write constantly--mind you write constantly
too. Love me, and remember me always, till I return, never, I hope, to
leave you again.--A. C."

Over this letter, Mat meditated long before he quietly cast it away
among the rest. When he had at last thrown it from him there remained
only three more to examine. They proved to be notes of no consequence,
and had been evidently written at an earlier period than the letters he
had just read. After hastily looking them over, he searched carefully
all through the box, but no papers, of any sort remained in it. That
hurried letter, with its abrupt announcement of the writer's departure
from England, was the latest in date--the last of the series!

After he had made this discovery, he sat for a little while vacantly
gazing out of the window. His sense of the useless result to which the
search he had been prosecuting had led him, t