Your photograph has been with me round the world,--in the miner's tent, on shipboard, among scenes where barbarous men do congregate; and everywhere it has been a presence, 'to warn, to comfort, to command;' and if I have come out of many trials firmer, better, more established in right than before; if I am more believing in religion, and in every way grounded and settled in the way you would have me,--it has been your spiritual presence and your power over me that has done it.
Besides that, I may as well tell you, I have never given up the hope that by and by you would see all this, and in some hour give me a different answer.
"When, therefore, I learned of your father's death, and afterwards of John's marriage, I thought it was time for me to return again.

I have come to New York, and, if you do not forbid, shall come to Springdale.
"Will you be a little glad to see me, Gracie?
Why not?
We are both alone now.

Let us take hands, and walk the same path together.

Shall we?
"Yours till death, and after, "WALTER SYDENHAM." Would she?
To say the truth, the question as asked now had a very different air from the question as asked years before, when, full of life and hope and enthusiasm, she had devoted herself to making an ideal home for her father and brother.

What other sympathy or communion, she had asked herself then, should she ever need than these friends, so very dear: and, if she needed more, there, in the future, was John's ideal wife, who, somehow, always came before her in the likeness of Rose Ferguson, and John's ideal children, whom she was sure she should love and pet as if they were her own.
And now here she was, in a house all by herself, coming down to her meals, one after another, without the excitement of a cheerful face opposite to her, and with all possibility of confidential intercourse with her brother entirely cut off.