he certainty of this. Therefore, as a generous
favor, give me six months more! At the end of that time I will write to
you again. Have patience with these brief lines: another word might be
a word too much."

You notice the change in her tone? The letter gave me the strongest
impression of a new, warm, almost anxious interest on her part. My
fancies, as first at Wampsocket, began to play all sorts of singular
pranks: sometimes she was rich and of an old family, sometimes
moderately poor and obscure, but always the same calm, reposeful face
and clear gray eyes. I ceased looking for her in society, quite sure
that I should not find her, and nursed a wild expectation of suddenly
meeting her, face to face, in the most unlikely places and under
startling circumstances. However, the end of it all was patience--
patience for six months.

There's not much more to tell; but this last letter is hard for me to
read. It came punctually, to a day. I knew it would, and at the last I
began to dread the time, as if a heavy note were falling due, and I had
no funds to meet it. My head was in a whirl when I broke the seal. The
fact in it stared at me blankly, at once, but it was a long time before
the words and sentences became intelligible.

"The stipulated time has come, and our hidden romance is at an end. Had
I taken this resolution a year ago, it would have saved me many vain
hopes, and you, perhaps, a little uncertainty. Forgive me, first, if
you can, and then hear the explanation:

"You wished for a personal interview: _you have had, not one, but
many._ We have met, in society, talked face to face, discussed the
weather, the opera, toilettes, Queechy, Aurora Floyd, Long Branch and
Newport, and exchanged a weary amount of fashionable gossip; and you
never guessed that I was governed by any deeper interest! I have
purposely uttered ridiculous platitudes, and you were as smilingly
courteous as if you enjoyed them: I have let fall remarks whose
hollowness and selfishness could not have escaped you, and have waited
in vain for a word of sharp, honest, manly reproof. Your manner to me
was unexceptionable, as it was to all other women: but there lies the
source of my disappointment, of--yes--of my sorrow!

"You appreciate, I can not doubt, the qualities in woman which men
value in one another--culture, independence of thought, a high and
earnest apprehension of life; but you know not how to seek them. It is
not true that a mature a