ly has God--what am I saying? Poor fools
that we humans are! We can hardly venture to praise God's
wisdom to-day when we think we see it, lest it turn out to be
only our own folly to-morrow.

But I find I'm only writing to myself, Doctor, not to you; so I
stop. Mary is well, and sends you much love.

Yours faithfully,
JOHN RICHLING.

"Very little about Mary," murmured Dr. Sevier. Yet he was rather pleased
than otherwise with the letter. He thrust it into his breast-pocket. In
the evening, at his fireside, he drew it out again and re-read it.

"Talks as if he had got into an impregnable castle," thought the Doctor,
as he gazed into the fire. "Book-keeper to a baker," he muttered, slowly
folding the sheet again. It somehow vexed him to see Richling so happy
in so low a station. But--"It's the joy of what he has escaped _from_,
not _to_," he presently remembered.

A fortnight or more elapsed. A distant relative of Dr. Sevier, a man of
his own years and profession, was his guest for two nights and a day as
he passed through the city, eastward, from an all-summer's study of
fevers in Mexico. They were sitting at evening on opposite sides of the
library fire, conversing in the leisurely ease of those to whom life is
not a novelty.

"And so you think of having Laura and Bess come out from Charleston, and
keep house for you this winter? Their mother wrote me to that effect."

"Yes," said Dr. Sevier. "Society here will be a great delight to them.
They will shine. And time will be less monotonous for me. It may suit
me, or it may not."

"I dare say it may," responded the kinsman, whereas in truth he was very
doubtful about it.

He added something, a moment later, about retiring for the night,
and his host had just said, "Eh?" when a slave, in a five-year-old
dress-coat, brought in the card of a person whose name was as well known
in New Orleans in those days as St. Patrick's steeple or the statue of
Jackson in the old Place d'Armes. Dr. Sevier turned it over and looked
for a moment ponderingly upon the domestic.

The relative rose.

"You needn't go," said Dr. Sevier; but he said "he had intended," etc.,
and went to his chamber.

The visitor entered. He was a dark, slender, iron gray man, of finely
cut, regular features, and seeming to be much more deeply wrinkled than
on scrutiny he proved to b