cruel that their autumn time of separation should
fall in the spring, when the sky is full of bounteous promise and the
earth of blissful trust.

Love is so improvident that a parting a year away is no more feared than
death, and a month's end seems dim and distant. But a week,--a week
only,--that even to love is short, and the beginning of the end. The
chilling mist that rose from the gulf of separation so near before them
overshadowed all the brief remnant of their path. They were constantly
together. But a silence had come upon them. Never had words seemed
idler, they had so much to say. They could say nothing that did not mock
the weight on their hearts, and seem trivial and impertinent because it
was exclusive of more important matter. The utmost they could do was
to lay their hearts open toward each other to receive every least
impression of voice, and look, and manner, to be remembered afterward.
At evening they went into the minster church, and, sitting in the
shadows, listened to the sweet, shrill choir of boys whose music
distilled the honey of sorrow; and as the deep bass organ chords gripped
their hearts with the tones that underlie all weal and woe, they looked
in each other's eyes, and did for a space feel so near that all the
separation that could come after seemed but a trifling thing.

It was all arranged between them. He was to earn money, or get a
position in business, and return in a year or two at most and bring her
to America.

"Oh," she said once, "if I could but sleep till thou comest again to
wake me, how blessed I should be; but, alas, I must wake all through the
desolate time!"

Although for the most part she comforted him rather than he her, yet at
times she gave way, and once suddenly turned to him and hid her face on
his breast, and said, trembling with tearless sobs:--

"I know I shall never see thee more, Karl. Thou wilt forget me in thy
great, far land and wilt love another. My heart tells me so."

And then she raised her head, and her streaming eyes blazed with anger.

"I will hover about thee, and if thou lovest another, I will kill her as
she sleeps by thy side."

And the woman must have loved him much who, after seeing that look of
hers, would have married him. But a moment after she was listening with
abject ear to his promises.

The day came at last. He was to leave at three o'clock. After the
noontide meal, Ida's mother sat with them and they talked a little about
Ameri