d in no way disturbed
her memory.

But the tomb still stood in his way.

"I am calm and tranquil," he wrote "Helen," "and but for a strange
shadow of coming evil which haunts me I should be happy. That I am not
supremely happy, even when I feel your dear love at my heart, terrifies
me."

Later he wrote,

"You say that all depends on my own firmness. If this be so all is safe.
Henceforward I am strong. But all does not depend, dear Helen, upon my
firmness--all depends upon the sincerity of your love."

* * * * *

A month later the skies of Providence shone brightly upon him. He
returned there, was received by Mrs. Whitman as her affianced lover,
delivered his brilliant lecture upon "The Poetic Principle" to a great
throng of enthusiastic hearers, and won a promise from his lady to marry
him at once and return with him to Fordham. He scribbled a line to
Mother Clemm notifying her to be ready to receive him and his bride and
went so far as to engage the services of a clergyman, and to sign a
marriage contract, in which Mrs. Whitman's property was made over to her
mother.

But--just at this point a note was slipped into the hand of "Helen,"
informing her that her lover had been seen drinking wine in the hotel.
When he called at her house soon afterward she received him surrounded
by her family and though there were no signs of the wine, said "no" to
him, emphatically--for the first time.

He plead, but she remained firm--receiving his passionate words of
remonstrance with sorrowful silence, while her mother, impatient at his
persistence, showed him the door. He prayed that she would at least
speak one word to him in farewell.

"What can I say?" she questioned.

"Say that you love me, Helen."

"I love you!"

With these words in his ears he was gone. As he passed out of the gate
and out of her life he saw, or fancied he saw, through the veiled
window, a white figure beckoning to him, but his steps were sternly set
toward the opposite direction--his whole being crying within him,
"Nevermore--nevermore!" She had stretched out her spiritlike hands, but
to draw them back again, in the fashion that fascinated and at the same
time maddened him, once too often. The wave of romantic feeling which
had borne him along since his vision of her in the garden suddenly
subsided, leaving him disillusioned--cold. The reaction was so violent
that instead of the magnetic attraction she had had for