had for the last half of the year been arranging his affairs with a view to it, and had entered into new business connections which would make it not only easy, but profitable, for him to remain abroad two years.  He urged me to go with them, but I refused.  I felt that the father and the mother and the children ought to be absolutely alone in this blessed reunion, and I have never regretted my decision, although the old world is yet an unknown world to me.

John Gray was a reticent and undemonstrative man, in spite of all the tenderness and passionateness in his nature.  But when he bade me good-by on the deck of the steamer, as he kissed me he whispered:—­

“Sally, I shall hold my very breath till I see Ellen.  I never knew how I loved her before.”  And the tears stood in his eyes.

I never saw Emma Long after she knew that John was to go abroad to join Ellen.  I found myself suddenly without courage to look in her face.  The hurry of my preparations for Alice was ample excuse for my not going to her house, and she did not come to ours.  I knew that John spent several evenings with her, and came home late, with a sad and serious face, and that was all.  A week before he sailed she joined a large and gay party for San Francisco and the Yosemite.  In all the newspaper accounts of the excursion, Mrs. Long was spoken of as the brilliant centre of all festivities.  I understood well that this was the first reaction of her proud and sensitive nature under an irremediable pain.  She never returned to ——­, but established herself in a Southern city, where she lived in great retirement for a year, doing good to all poor and suffering people, and spending the larger part of her fortune in charity.  Early in the second year there was an epidemic of yellow fever:  Mrs. Long refused to leave the city, and went as fearlessly as the physicians to visit and nurse the worst cases.  But after the epidemic had passed by, she herself was taken ill, and died suddenly in a hospital ward, surrounded by the very patients whom she had nursed back to health.  Nothing I could say in my own words would give so vivid an idea of the meeting between John Gray and his wife, as the first letter which I received from little Alice:—­

“Darling auntie,—­

“It is too bad you did not come too.  The voyage was horrid.  Papa was so much sicker than I, that I had to take care of him all the time; but my head ached so that I kept seeing black spots if I stooped over to kiss papa; but papa said, I was just like another mamma.

“Oh, Auntie, only think, there was a mistake about the letters, and mamma never got the letter to tell her that we were coming; and she was out on the balcony of the hotel when we got out of the carriage, and first she saw me; and the lady who was with her said she turned first red and then so white the lady thought she was sick; and then the next minute she saw papa, and she just fell right down among all the people, and looked as if she was dead; and the very first thing poor papa and I saw, when we got up-stairs, was mamma being carried by two men, and papa and I both thought she was dead; and papa fell right down on his knees, and made the men put mamma down on the floor, and everybody talked out loud, and papa never spoke a word, but just looked at mamma, and nobody knew who papa was till I spoke, and I said,—­