"To see some friends," responded Thelma quietly. "Now do not ask any
more questions, Britta, but go and post my letter. I want father to get
it as soon as possible, and you will lose the post if you are not very
quick."

Thus reminded, Britta hastened off, determining to run all the way, in
order to get back before her mistress left the house. Thelma, however,
was too quick for her. As soon as Britta had gone, she took the letter
she had written to Philip, and slipped it within the pages of a small
volume of poems he had lately been reading. It was a new book entitled
"Gladys the Singer," and its leading _motif_ was the old,
never-exhausted subject of a woman's too faithful love, betrayal, and
despair. As she opened it, her eyes fell by chance on a few lines of
hopeless yet musical melancholy, which, like a sad song heard suddenly,
made her throat swell with rising yet restrained tears. They ran thus:--

"Oh! I can drown, or, like a broken lyre,
Be thrown to earth, or cast upon a fire,--
I can be made to feel the pangs of death,
And yet be constant to the quest of breath,--
Our poor pale trick of living through the lies
We name Existence when that 'something' dies
Which we call Honor. Many and many a way
Can I be struck or fretted night or day
In some new fashion,--or condemn'd the while
To take for food the semblance of a smile,--
The left-off rapture of a slain caress,--"

Ah!--she caught her breath sobbingly, "The left-off rapture of a slain
caress!" Yes,--that would be her portion now if--if she stayed to
receive it. But she would not stay! She turned over the volume
abstractedly, scarcely conscious of the action,--and suddenly, as if the
poet-writer of it had been present to probe her soul and make her inmost
thoughts public, she read:--

"Because I am unlov'd of thee to-day,
And undesired as sea-weeds in the sea!"

Yes!--that was the "because" of everything that swayed her sorrowful
spirit,--"because" she was "unlov'd and undesired."

She hesitated no longer, but shut the book with her farewell letter
inside it, and put it back in its former place on the little table
beside Philip's arm-chair. Then she considered how she should
distinguish it by some mark that should attract her husband's attention
toward it,--and loosening from her neck a thin gold chain on which was
suspended a small diamond cross with the names "Philip" and "Thelma"
engr