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until the moment they are withdrawn, unite to keep one in the straight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 easy-going 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
the advice. But then again a memory emerged from that chamber of his
soul which s