"Oh, if you only would be one," and the light which shone in Adah's eyes
seemed born of Heaven. "I am going, it is true, but there is One who
will stay with you--One who loves you so much."

He thought she meant Alice, and he grasped her hand, and exclaimed:

"Loves me, Adah, does she? Say it again! Does Alice Johnson love me, me?
Hugh? Did she tell you so? Adah," and Hugh spoke vehemently, "I have
admitted to you what an hour ago I fancied nothing could wring from me,
but I trust to your discretion not to betray it; certainly not to her,
not to Alice, for, of course, there is no hope. You do not think there
is? You know her better than I," and he looked wistfully at Adah, who
felt constrained to answer:

"There might have been, I'm sure, if she had seen no one else."

"Then she has--she does love another?" and Hugh's face was white as
ashes.

"I do not know that she loves him; she did not say so," Adah replied,
thinking it better for Hugh that he should know the whole. "There was a
boy or youth, who saved her life at the peril of his own, and she
remembered him so long, praying for him daily that God would bring him
to her again, so she could thank him for his kindness."

Poor Hugh. He saw clearly now how it all was. He had suffered his uncle,
who affected a dislike for "Hugh," to call him "Irving." He had also,
for no reason at all, suffered Alice to think he was a Stanley, and this
was the result.

"I can live on just as I did before," was again the mental cry of his
wrung heart.

How changed were all things now, for the certainty that Alice never
would be his had cast a pall over everything, and even the autumnal
sunshine streaming through the window seemed hateful to him.
Involuntarily his mind wandered to the sale and to Rocket, perhaps at
that very moment upon the block.

"If I could have kept him, it would have been some consolation," he
sighed, just as the sound of hoofs dashing up to the door met his ear.

It was Claib, and just as Hugh was wondering at his headlong haste, he
burst into the room, exclaiming:

"Oh, Mas'r Hugh, 'tain't no use now. He'd done sold, Rocket is. I hearn
him knocked down, and then I comed to tell you, an' he looked so
handsome, too,--caperin' like a kitten. They done made me show him off,
for he wouldn't come for nobody else, but the minit he fotched a sight
of dis chile, he flung 'em right and left. I fairly cried to see how he
went on."

There was no color now in H