d."

"But, Bertha," exclaimed he, looking mournfully at her, "it is not true
when you say that I owe you nothing. Six years ago, when first I wooed
you, you could not return my love, and you sent me out into the world,
and even refused to accept any pledge or promise for the future."

"And you returned," she responded, "a man, such as my hope had pictured
you; but, while I had almost been standing still, you had outgrown me,
and outgrown your old self, and, with your old self, outgrown its love
for me, for your love was not of your new self, but of the old. Alas!
it is a sad tale, but it is true."

She spoke gravely now, and with a steadier voice, but her eyes hung
upon his face with an eager look of expectation, as if yearning to
detect there some gleam of hope, some contradiction of the dismal
truth. He read that look aright and it pierced him like a sharp sword.
He made a brave effort to respond to its appeal, but his features
seemed hard as stone, and he could only cry out against his destiny,
and bewail his misfortune and hers.

Toward evening, Ralph was sitting in an open boat, listening to the
measured oar-strokes of the boatmen who were rowing him out to the
nearest stopping-place of the steamer. The mountains lifted their great
placid heads up among the sun-bathed clouds, and the fjord opened its
cool depths as if to make room for their vast reflections. Ralph felt
as if he were floating in the midst of the blue infinite space, and,
with the strength which this feeling inspired, he tried to face boldly
the thought from which he had but a moment ago shrunk as from something
hopelessly sad and perplexing.

And in that hour he looked fearlessly into the gulf which separates the
New World from the Old. He had hoped to bridge it; but, alas! it can
not be bridged.

THE IDYL OF RED GULCH
---------------------
BY BRET HARTE

_Francis Bret Harte (born at Albany, N. Y., August 25, 1839; died in
1902) wrought a revolution in the art of story-writing by his
California tale, "The Luck of Roaring Camp" which appeared in 1868 in
the second number of "The Overland Monthly," of which Harte was editor.
This was followed by a number of stories of the same original quality,
such as "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" and "The Idyl of Red Gulch,"
concerning which Parke Godwin wrote in "Putnam's Magazine," 1870: "Bret
Harte has deepened and broadened our literary and moral sympathies; he
has broken the sway of the artific