the money and escaping the clutches of "the three horrid old
men;" but she would let me know again if she happened to change
her mind. And so, with best love, she would beg to remain always
affectionately mine, as long as she was well out of my reach.

The summer passed, the autumn came, and I never heard from her again.
Under ordinary circumstances, this long silence might have made me feel
a little uneasy. But news reached me about this time from the Crimea
that my son was wounded--not dangerously, thank God, but still severely
enough to be la id up--and all my anxieties were now centered in that
direction. By the beginning of September, however, I got better accounts
of him, and my mind was made easy enough to let me think of Jessie
again. Just as I was considering the necessity of writing once more to
my refractory ward, a second letter arrived from her. She had returned
at last from abroad, had suddenly changed her mind, suddenly grown sick
of society, suddenly become enamored of the pleasures of retirement,
and suddenly found out that the three horrid old men were three dear old
men, and that six weeks' solitude at The Glen Tower was the luxury, of
all others, that she languished for most. As a necessary result of this
altered state of things, she would therefore now propose to spend her
allotted six weeks with her guardian. We might certainly expect her on
the twentieth of September, and she would take the greatest care to fit
herself for our society by arriving in the lowest possible spirits, and
bringing her own sackcloth and ashes along with her.

The first ordeal to which this alarming letter forced me to submit was
the breaking of the news it contained to my two brothers. The disclosure
affected them very differently. Poor dear Owen merely turned pale,
lifted his weak, thin hands in a panic-stricken manner, and then sat
staring at me in speechless and motionless bewilderment. Morgan stood
up straight before me, plunged both his hands into his pockets, burst
suddenly into the harshest laugh I ever heard from his lips, and told
me, with an air of triumph, that it was exactly what he expected.

"What you expected?" I repeated, in astonishment.

"Yes," returned Morgan, with his bitterest emphasis. "It doesn't
surprise me in the least. It's the way things go in this world--it's the
regular moral see-saw of good and evil--the old story with the old end
to it. They were too happy in the garden of Eden--down comes