, Ralph. Let us both remain free; and, if you return and still love
me, then come, and I shall receive you and listen to you. And even if
you have outgrown your love, which is, indeed, more probable, come still
to visit me wherever I may be, and we shall meet as friends and rejoice
in the meeting."

"You know best," he murmured. "Let it be as you have said."

He arose, took her face between his hands, gazed long and tenderly into
her eyes, pressed a kiss upon her forehead, and hastened away.

That night Ralph boarded the steamer for Hull, and three weeks later
landed in New York.

IV.

The first three months of Ralph's sojourn in America were spent in vain
attempts to obtain a situation. Day after day he walked down Broadway,
calling at various places of business and night after night he returned
to his cheerless room with a faint heart and declining spirits. It was,
after all, a more serious thing than he had imagined, to cut the cable
which binds one to the land of one's birth. There a hundred subtile
influences, the existence of which no one suspects until the moment they
are withdrawn, unite to keep one in the straight path of rectitude, or
at least of external respectability; and Ralph's life had been all in
society; the opinion of his fellow-men had been the one force to which
he implicitly deferred, and the conscience by which he had been wont
to test his actions had been nothing but the aggregate judgment of his
friends. To such a man the isolation and the utter irresponsibility of a
life among strangers was tenfold more dangerous; and Ralph found, to his
horror, that his character contained innumerable latent possibilities
which the easygoing life in his home probably never would have revealed
to him. It often cut him to the quick, when, on entering an office in
his daily search for employment, he was met by hostile or suspicious
glances, or when, as it occasionally happened, the door was slammed in
his face, as if he were a vagabond or an impostor. Then the wolf was
often roused within him, and he felt a momentary wild desire to become
what the people here evidently believed him to be. Many a night he
sauntered irresolutely about the gambling places in obscure streets,
and the glare of light, the rude shouts and clamors in the same moment
repelled and attracted him. If he went to the devil, who would care? His
father had himself pointed out the way to him; and nobody could blame
him if he followed