nd Angus passed along the
assurance, not going into details, and every one concerned was
satisfied.

While, in a Parish House many miles down the railed roads that measure
the country, a man waited. And waited, ever with a sicker
restlessness, a more unendurable longing. Saturday came, and the man
hoped, till the hour for any boat's sailing was long past, for a
letter, another telegram. Then, "She has had it mailed after she
left," he reasoned, and all of Monday and Tuesday he waited and watched
and invented reasons why it might come to-morrow or even later--even
from the other side--from Germany. Two weeks, three, and then four, he
held to varying fictions about the letter, which Arline Baker, the lady
of Tom Mullins's heart, had picked up from the floor that day in
October and tucked into a bureau drawer to give to Tom--tucked under a
summer blouse. And the weather had turned chilly, helping along Fate
as weather will at times, and the summer blouse had not been worn, and
the letter had been forgotten.

Then there came a day when he took measures with himself, because
suspense and misery were eating his strength. He faced the situation;
he had poured his heart, keeping back nothing, at her feet. And she
had not answered, except with a few words of a telegram. He knew, by
that, that she had got his letter, the first love-letter of his life.
But she had not cared enough to answer it. Or else, his faith in her
argued, something had happened, there had been some unimaginable reason
to prevent her answering. That the letter had been lost was so
commonplace a solution that it did not occur to him. One does not
think of mice setting off gunpowder magazines. At all events he was
facing a stone wall; there was no further step to take; she must be in
Germany; he did not know her address; if he did, how could he write
again? A man may not hound a woman with his love. Yet he was all but
mad with anxiety about her, beyond this other suffering. Why had she
suddenly gone to Germany? What did that mean? In his black struggles
for enlightenment, he believed sometimes that, in a fantastic attack of
_noblesse oblige_, she had married the other man and gone to Germany
with him. That thought drove him near insanity. So he gathered up,
alone before his fire, all these imaginings and doubts, and sat with
them into the night, and made a packet of them, and locked them away,
as well as he might, into a chamber of his memo