and said words which I
hardly waited for you to finish, for at last I was free to love
you, free to love and free to say so. The morning paper had brought
news. A telegraphic despatch from Seattle told how a man had
struggled into Nome, frozen, bleeding and without accouterments or
companion. It was with difficulty he had kept his feet and turned
in at the first tent he came to. Indeed, he had only time to
speak his name before he fell dead. This name was what made this
despatch important to me. It was William Pfeiffer. For me there
was but one William Pfeiffer in the Klondike--my husband--and he
was dead! That was why you found me laughing. But not in mirth.
I am not so bad as that; but because I could breathe again without
feeling a clutch about my throat. I did not know till then how
nearly I had been stifled.

"We were not long in marrying after that. I was terrified at delay,
not because I feared any contradiction of the report which had given
this glorious release, but because I dreaded lest some hint of my
early folly should reach you and dim the pride with which you
regarded me. I wanted to feel myself yours so closely and so dearly
that you would not mind if any one told you that I had once cared,
or thought I had cared, for another. The week of our marriage came;
I was mad with gaiety and ecstatic with hope. Nothing had occurred
to mar my prospects. No letter from Denver--no memento from the
Klondike, no word even from Wallace, who had gone north with his
brother. Soon I should be called wife again, but by lips I loved,
and to whose language my heart thrilled. The past, always vague,
would soon be no more than a forgotten dream--an episode quite
closed. I could afford from this moment on to view life like other
girls and rejoice in my youth and the love which every day was
becoming more and more to me.

"But God had His eye upon me, and in the midst of my happiness and
the hurry of our final preparations His bolt fell. It struck me
while I was at the--don't laugh; rather shudder--at the
dressmaker's shop in Fourteenth Street. I was leaning over a table,
chattering like a magpie over the way I wanted a gown trimmed, when
my eye fell on a scrap of newspaper in which something had come
rolled to madame. It was torn at the edge, but on the bit lying
under my eyes I saw my husband's name, William Pfeiffer, and that
the paper was a Denver one. There was but one William Pfeiffer
in Denver--