For one second Emma Long’s face was sad to see.  Such astonishment, such pain, were in it, my heart ached for her.  Then a look of angry resentment succeeded the pain, and merely saying, “I am very sorry; but I really cannot wait for him.  It is now almost too late to go,” she had left the room and closed the outer door before I could think of any words to say.

I ran up to John’s room, and told him through the closed door.  He made no reply for a moment, and then said,—­

“No wonder she is vexed.  It was unpardonable rudeness.  Tell Robert to run at once for a carriage for me.”

In a very few moments he came down dressed for the party, but with no shadow of disturbance on his face.  He was still thinking of the letters.  He took up his own, and putting it into an inside breast-pocket, said, as he kissed Alice, “Papa will take mamma’s letter to the party, if he can’t take mamma!”

I shed grateful tears that night before I went to sleep.  How I longed to write to Ellen of the incident; but I had resolved not once to disregard her request that the whole subject be a sealed one.  And I trusted that Alice would remember to tell it.  Well I might!  At breakfast Alice said,—­

“Oh, papa, I told mamma that you carried her to the party in your breast-pocket; that is, you carried her letter!”

I fancied that John’s cheek flushed a little as he said,—­

“You might tell mamma that papa carries her everywhere in his breast-pocket, little girlie, and mamma would understand.”

I think from that day I never feared for Ellen’s future.  I fancied, too, that from that day there was a new light in John Gray’s eyes.  Perhaps it might have been only the new light in my own; but I think when a man knows that he has once, for one hour, forgotten a promise to meet a woman whose presence has been dangerously dear to him, he must be aware of his dawning freedom.

The winter was nearly over.  Ellen had said nothing to us about returning.

“Dr. Willis tells me that, from what Ellen writes to him of her health, he thinks it would be safer for her to remain abroad another year,” said John to me one morning at breakfast.

“Oh, she never will stay another year!” exclaimed I.

“Not unless I go out to stay with her,” said John, very quietly.

“Oh, John, could you?” and, “Oh, papa, will you take me?” exclaimed Alice and I in one breath.

“Yes,” and “yes,” said John, laughing, “and Sally too, if she will go.”

He then proceeded to tell me that he had been all winter contemplating this; that he believed they would never again have so good an opportunity to travel in Europe, and that Dr. Willis’s hesitancy about Ellen’s health had decided the question.  He had been planning and deliberating as silently and unsuspectedly as Ellen had done the year before.  Never once had it crossed my mind that he desired it, or that it could be.  But I found that he