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Two or three times Emerson read the line--"I leave for Ivy Cliff

to-day"--and looked at the signature, before its ht

"Gone to Ivy Cliff!" he said, at last, in a low, hoarse voice

"Gone, and without a word of intier! Has it come to this, and so soon! God help us!"

And the unhappy man sunk into a chair, heart-stricken and weak as a

child

For nearly the whole of the night that followed he walked the floor

of his room, and the next day found him in a feverish condition of

bothhis wife

to Ivy Cliff, if it caone home to her father with only an announcement of the fact

He would wait soain, she must come back to him This was his first,

spontaneous conclusion; and it was not questioned in his thought,

nor did he waver from it an instant She must come back of her own

free will, if she came back at all

It was on the twentieth day of December that Irene left New York

Not until the twenty-second could a letter from her reach Hartley,

if, on reflection or after conference with her father, she desired

to make a communication But the twenty-second came and departed

without a word from the absent one So did the twenty-third By this

tirown very calain the history of their lives since ether, and in this history he could see nothing