One evening when he paid her a visit after the absence of a week, he found her charmingly dressed, and merry, but in a strange fashion which he could not understand.  The baby, she said, was down stairs with the landlady, and she free for her Paul.  She read to him, she sang to him, she bewitched him afresh with the graces he had helped to develop in her.  He said to himself when he left her that surely never was there a more gracious creature—­and she was utterly his own!  It was the last flicker of the dying light—­the gorgeous sunset she had resolved to carry with her in her memory forever.  When he sought her again the next evening, he found her landlady in tears.  She had vanished, taking with her nothing but her child, and her child’s garments.  The gown she had worn the night before hung in her bedroom—­every thing but what she must then be wearing was left behind.  The woman wept, spoke of her with genuine affection, and said she had paid every thing.  To his questioning she answered that they had gone away in a cab:  she had called it, but knew neither the man nor his number.  Persuading himself she had but gone to see some friend, he settled himself in her rooms to await her return, but a week rightly served to consume his hope.  The iron entered into his soul, and for a time tortured him.  He wept—­but consoled himself that he wept, for it proved to himself that he was not heartless.  He comforted himself further in the thought that she knew where to find him and that when trouble came upon her, she would remember how good he had been to her, and what a return she had made for it.  Because he would not give up every thing to her, liberty and all, she had left him!  And in revenge, having so long neglected him for the child, she had for the last once roused in her every power of enchantment, had brought her every charm into play, that she might lastingly bewitch him with the old spell, and the undying memory of their first bliss—­then left him to his lonely misery!  She had done what she could for the ruin of a man of education, a man of family, a man on the way to distinction!—­a man of genius, he said even, but he was such only as every man is:  he was a man of latent genius.

But verily, though our sympathy goes all with a woman like her, such a man, however little he deserves, and however much he would scorn it, is far more an object of pity.  She has her love, has not been false thereto, and one day will through suffering find the path to the door of rest.  When she left him, her soul was endlessly richer than his.  The music, of which he said she knew nothing, in her soul moved a deep wave, while it blew but a sparkling ripple on his; the poetry they read together echoed in a far profounder depth of her being, and I do not believe she came to loathe it as he did; and when she read of Him who reasoned that the sins of a certain woman must have been forgiven her, else how could she love so much, she may well have been able, from the depth of such another loving heart, to believe utterly in Him—­while we know that her poor, shrunken lover came to think it manly, honest, reasonable, meritorious to deny Him.