Mr. Flint walked out, sent the note, and returned and took his place silently at his own table.  He was a man of concentration, and he put his mind on the arguments he was composing to certain political leaders.  Mr. Worthington merely pretended to work as he waited for the answer to come back.  And presently, when it did come back, he tore it open and read it with an expression not often on his lips.  He flung the paper at Mr. Flint.

“Read that,” he said.

This is what Mr. Flint read:  “Miss Wetherell begs to inform Mr. Isaac D. Worthington that she can have no communication or intercourse with him whatsoever.”

Mr. Flint handed it back without a word.  His opinion of the school-teacher had risen mightily, but he did not say so.  Mr. Worthington took the note, too, without a word.  Speech was beyond him, and he crushed the paper as fiercely as he would have liked to have crushed Cynthia, had she been in his hands.

One accomplishment which Cynthia had learned at Miss Sadler’s school was to write a letter in the third person, Miss Sadler holding that there were occasions when it was beneath a lady’s dignity to write a direct note.  And Cynthia, sitting at her little desk in the schoolhouse during her recess, had deemed this one of the occasions.  She could not bring herself to write, “My dear Mr. Worthington.”  Her anger, when the note had been handed to her, was for the moment so great that she could not go on with her classes; but she had controlled it, and compelled Silas to stand in the entry until recess, when she sat with her pen in her hand until that happy notion of the third person occurred to her.  And after Silas had gone she sat still; though trembling a little at intervals, picturing with some satisfaction Mr. Worthington’s appearance when he received her answer.  Her instinct told her that he had received his son’s letter, and that he had sent for her to insult her.  By sending for her, indeed, he had insulted her irrevocably, and that is why she trembled.

Poor Cynthia! her troubles came thick and fast upon her in those days.  When she reached home, there was the letter which Ephraim had left on the table addressed in the familiar, upright handwriting, and when Cynthia saw it, she caught her hand sharply at her breast, as if the pain there had stopped the beating of her heart.  Well it was for Bob’s peace of mind that he could not see her as she read it, and before she had come to the end there were drops on the sheets where the purple ink had run.  How precious would have been those drops to him!  He would never give her up.  No mandate or decree could separate them—­nothing but death.  And he was happier now so he told her—­than he had been for months:  happy in the thought that he was going out into the world to win bread for her, as became a man.  Even if he had not her to strive for, he saw now that such was the only course for him.  He could not conform.

It was a manly letter,—­how manly Bob himself never knew.  But Cynthia knew, and she wept over it and even pressed it to her lips—­for there was no one to see.  Yes, she loved him as she would not have believed it possible to love, and she sat through the afternoon reading his words and repeating them until it seemed that he were there by her side, speaking them.  They came, untrammelled and undefiled, from his heart into hers.