The letter from which I give this extract was a reprieve.  He had five or six weeks before him still.

Soon after this, his faithful ally, Mr. Carden, worked on Grace’s pity; and as Coventry never complained, nor irritated her in any way, she softened to him.  Then all the battery of imploring looks was brought to bear on her by Coventry, and of kind admonition and entreaty by her father; and so, between them, they gently thrust her down the slope.

“Stop all their tongues,” said Mr. Carden.  “Come back to Hillsborough a wife.  I gave up my choice to yours once.  Now give me my way.  I am touched to the heart by this young man’s devotion:  he invites me to live with him when you are married.  What other young fellow would show me so much mercy?”

“Does he?” said Grace.  “I will try and reward him for that, and for speaking well of one who could not defend himself.  But give me a little time.”

Mr. Carden conveyed this to Coventry with delight, and told him he should only have another month or so to wait.  Coventry received this at first with unmixed exultation, but by-and-by he began to feel superstitious.  Matters were now drawing to such a point that Little might very well arrive before the wedding-day, and just before it.  Perhaps Heaven had that punishment in store for him; the cup was to be in his very grasp, and then struck out of it.

Only a question of time!  But what is every race?  The space between winner and loser strikes the senses more obviously; but the race is just as much a question of time as of space.  Buridan runs second for the Derby, defeated by a length.  But give Buridan a start of one second, and he shall beat the winner—­by two lengths.

Little now wrote from Chicago that every thing was going on favorably, and he believed it would end in a sale of the patent clip in the United States and Canada for fifty thousand dollars, but no royalty.

This letter was much shorter than any of the others; and, from that alone, his guilty reader could see that the writer intended to follow it in person almost immediately.

Coventry began almost to watch the sun in his course.  When it was morning he wished it was evening, and when it was evening he wished it was morning.

Sometimes he half wondered to see how calmly the sun rose and set, and Nature pursued her course, whilst he writhed in the agony of suspense, and would gladly have given a year out of his life for a day.

At last, by Mr. Carden’s influence, the wedding-day was fixed.  But soon after this great triumph came another intercepted letter.  He went to his room and his hands trembled violently as he opened it.

His eye soon fixed on this passage: