fice."

Dolly took the letter from her and opened it slowly, and there, as she
knelt, read it, word for word, as if it had been something she had never
seen before. Then she put it back into the envelope and laid it down.

"A dead letter!" she said. "A dead letter! If _he_ had sent it back to
me, I think it would have cured me; but _now_ there is no cure for me at
all. If he had read it, he would have come,--if he had _only_ read it;
but it is a dead letter, and he is gone."

There were no tears, the blow had been too heavy. It was only Aimee
who had tears to shed, and it was Dolly who tried to console her in a
strained, weary sort of way.

"Don't cry," she said, "it is all over now. Perhaps the worst part of
the pain is past. There will be no house at Putney, and the solitary
rose-bush will bloom for some one else; they may sell the green sofa,
now, as cheap as they will, we shall never buy it. Our seven years of
waiting have all ended in a dead letter."

CHAPTER XIV. ~ SEVEN LONG YEARS, BELOVED, SEVEN LONG YEARS.

AND so Grif disappeared from the haunts of Vagabondia, and was seen no
more. And to Aimee was left the delicate task of explaining the cause
of his absence, which, it must be said, she did in a manner at once
creditable to her tact and affection for both Dolly and the unconscious
cause of all her misery.

"There has been a misunderstanding," she said, "which was no fault
of Dolly's, and scarcely a fault of Grif's; and it has ended very
unhappily, and Grif has gone away, and just at present it seems as if
everything was over,--but I can't help hoping it is not so bad as that."

"Oh, he will come back again--safe enough," commented Phil,
philosophically, holding paint-brush No. 1 in his mouth, while he
manipulated with No. 2. "He will come back in sackcloth and ashes; he is
just that sort, you know,--thunder and lightning, fire and tow. And they
will make it up ecstatically in secret, and pretend that nothing has
been the matter, and there will be no going into the parlor for weeks
without whistling all the way across the hall."

"I always go in backward after they have had a quarrel," said Mollie,
looking up from a half-made pinafore of Tod's, which, in the zeal of her
repentance, she had decided on finishing.

"Not a bad plan, either," said Phil "We all know how _their_ differences
of opinion terminate. As to matters being at an end between them, that
is all nonsense; they could n't live wit