A month later the skies of Providence shone brightly upon him.  He returned there, was received by Mrs. Whitman as her affianced lover, delivered his brilliant lecture upon “The Poetic Principle” to a great throng of enthusiastic hearers, and won a promise from his lady to marry him at once and return with him to Fordham.  He scribbled a line to Mother Clemm notifying her to be ready to receive him and his bride and went so far as to engage the services of a clergyman, and to sign a marriage contract, in which Mrs. Whitman’s property was made over to her mother.

But—­just at this point a note was slipped into the hand of “Helen,” informing her that her lover had been seen drinking wine in the hotel.  When he called at her house soon afterward she received him surrounded by her family and though there were no signs of the wine, said “no” to him, emphatically—­for the first time.

He plead, but she remained firm—­receiving his passionate words of remonstrance with sorrowful silence, while her mother, impatient at his persistence, showed him the door.  He prayed that she would at least speak one word to him in farewell.

“What can I say?” she questioned.

“Say that you love me, Helen.”

“I love you!”

With these words in his ears he was gone.  As he passed out of the gate and out of her life he saw, or fancied he saw, through the veiled window, a white figure beckoning to him, but his steps were sternly set toward the opposite direction—­his whole being crying within him, “Nevermore—­nevermore!” She had stretched out her spiritlike hands, but to draw them back again, in the fashion that fascinated and at the same time maddened him, once too often.  The wave of romantic feeling which had borne him along since his vision of her in the garden suddenly subsided, leaving him disillusioned—­cold.  The reaction was so violent that instead of the magnetic attraction she had had for him he felt himself positively repelled by the thought of her unearthly beauty—­her mysterious eyes.

He went straight to the depot and took the train just leaving, which would bear him back to the cottage among the cherry trees.

Mother Clemm, expecting him to bring home a bride, had spent the day putting an extra touch of brightness upon the simple but already spotless, home.  A cheerful fire was in the grate; branches of holly, cedar and such other such bits of beauty as the woods afforded were everywhere about the house, and the Mother herself, in the snowiest of caps with the sheerest of floating strings and a gallant look of welcome upon her sorrowful face, stood at the window and watched for the coming of the son that Heaven had given her, and the woman who was to take the place of the daughter that Heaven had taken away from her.  Her oak-like nature had quailed at the thought—­but it had withstood many a blast, it could weather one more, and after all, if “Eddie” were happy—.