some likeness to your mother; but
there has been no time, and ere you receive this letter I shall be gone.
I therefore send the picture to you by the _concierge_. It is my parting
gift to you. I can offer no greater proof of my love. Farewell."

Once written, I dared not read the letter over. I thrust it under her
door, and in less than five minutes was on my way to the station.

* * * * *

CHAPTER LIII.

THE FADING OF THE RAINBOW.

I loved a love once, fairest among women;
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her--
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

LAMB.

Beautifully and truly, in the fourth book of the most poetical of
stories, has a New World romancist described the state of a sorrowing
lover. "All around him," saith he, "seemed dreamy and vague; all within
him, as in a sun's eclipse. As the moon, whether visible or invisible,
has power over the tides of the ocean, so the face of that lady, whether
present or absent, had power over the tides of his soul, both by day and
night, both waking and sleeping. In every pale face and dark eye he saw
a resemblance to her; and what the day denied him in reality, the night
gave him in dreams."

Such was, very faithfully, my own condition of mind during the interval
which succeeded my departure from Paris--the only difference being that
Longfellow's hero was rejected by the woman he loved, and sorrowing for
that rejection; whilst I, neither rejected nor accepted, mourned another
grief, and through the tears of that trouble, looked forward anxiously
to my uncertain future.

I reached Saxonholme the night before my father's funeral, and remained
there for ten days. I found myself, to my surprise, almost a rich
man--that is to say, sufficiently independent to follow the bent of my
inclinations as regarded the future.

My first impulse, on learning the extent of my means, was to relinquish
a career that had been from the first distasteful to me--my second was
to leave the decision to Hortense. To please her, to be worthy of her,
to prove my devotion to her, was what I most desired upon earth. If she
wished to see me useful and active in my generation, I would do my best
to be so for her sake--if, on the contrary, she only cared to see me
content, I would devote myself henceforth to that life of "retired
leisure" that I had always coveted. Could man love more honestly
and heartily?

One year of fore