rgotten a promise to meet a woman whose
presence has been dangerously dear to him, he must be aware of his dawning
freedom.

The winter was nearly over. Ellen had said nothing to us about returning.

"Dr. Willis tells me that, from what Ellen writes to him of her health, he
thinks it would be safer for her to remain abroad another year," said John
to me one morning at breakfast.

"Oh, she never will stay another year!" exclaimed I.

"Not unless I go out to stay with her," said John, very quietly.

"Oh, John, could you?" and, "Oh, papa, will you take me?" exclaimed Alice
and I in one breath.

"Yes," and "yes," said John, laughing, "and Sally too, if she will go."

He then proceeded to tell me that he had been all winter contemplating
this; that he believed they would never again have so good an opportunity
to travel in Europe, and that Dr. Willis's hesitancy about Ellen's health
had decided the question. He had been planning and deliberating as
silently and unsuspectedly as Ellen had done the year before. Never once
had it crossed my mind that he desired it, or that it could be. But I
found that he had for the last half of the year been arranging his affairs
with a view to it, and had entered into new business connections which
would make it not only easy, but profitable, for him to remain abroad two
years. He urged me to go with them, but I refused. I felt that the father
and the mother and the children ought to be absolutely alone in this
blessed reunion, and I have never regretted my decision, although the old
world is yet an unknown world to me.

John Gray was a reticent and undemonstrative man, in spite of all the
tenderness and passionateness in his nature. But when he bade me good-by
on the deck of the steamer, as he kissed me he whispered:--

"Sally, I shall hold my very breath till I see Ellen. I never knew how I
loved her before." And the tears stood in his eyes.

I never saw Emma Long after she knew that John was to go abroad to join
Ellen. I found myself suddenly without courage to look in her face. The
hurry of my preparations for Alice was ample excuse for my not going to
her house, and she did not come to ours. I knew that John spent several
evenings with her, and came home late, with a sad and serious face, and
that was all. A week before he sailed she joined a large and gay party for
San Francisco and the Yosemite. In all the newspaper accounts of the
excursion, Mrs. Long was spoken of as the b