the curtailed and weatherbeaten stovepipe to the proper angle, opened his paternal arms and feebly embraced his daughter.  He announced himself to all concerned as a broken man—­a poor unfortunate going home to die, where his bones might rest with those of his ancestors, and where his humble name and his honorable record in the service of his country would be cherished by his fellow-citizens after he should be gone.  Providence had surely, in his extremity, drawn his daughter to his succor.  Now he was relieved of all anxiety, and might turn his mind to things above.  His daughter would fan the spark of life, and keep it burning, God willing, till the old home should be reached.  Then he would release her from her labor of love.  Then he would be at peace with all the world, and would cheerfully die in the midst of his weeping friends.  He had up to this hour been haunted with the apprehension that his poor old frame might be left to moulder somewhere in the wide, inhospitable desert that stretched between him and his roof-tree.  Now that dreadful apprehension was banished.  The Lord had remembered his own.  Dora would walk beside his beast and protect him, and the knowledge that she had thus been instrumental in prolonging her father’s life would be her exceeding great reward.

A most enchanting prospect for Dora, was it not?  Even she did not put her neck under the yoke until she had first informed her father of her momentous secret, and invited him to assume his role in the programme already mentioned as arranged by her lover and herself.  But, as a matter of course, he scorned the suggestion.  Posey begged and raved, but without avail.  The girl never had a question in her mind as to her duty from the moment she saw her father approaching.  She must do as he said—­go back with him as his slave.  There was no help for it.

And so the lovers held a hurried consultation, pledged eternal fidelity and all that, agreed that Posey should go on and make his fortune, and that when Dora should be released by death from her duty to her father he should either come back for her or she should go to him, and then they would be married.  Meantime, he engaged to write to her frequently, and she promised to write to him faithfully once every week.  And then farewell!

By this time the doctor’s party had left him far behind, and naturally, considering the capabilities of his steed, he was growing impatient to move on.  The early stars were already coming out, and he testily reminded Dora, as she lingered over her leavetaking, that there was no more time to lose.  And so, without a murmur, the devoted soul turned her back upon all her new-born hope and joy, and dutifully took up the long and dreadful homeward march on foot.  And Posey, his heart in his mouth and his tongue charged with unutterable execrations, gazed gloomily down into the darkening valley, that half an hour before had been filled with a radiance “that never shone on land or sea.”  And as he gazed all the bad in him persistently rose up to curse the despicable author of his woe, while all the good in him—­about an even balance—­rose up to bless the fast-disappearing idol of his heart.