“Beulah:  Accept the accompanying case and desk as a slight testimony of the affection of

“Your sincere friend,

“Alice Asbury.”

Tears sprang into her eyes as she opened the desk and discovered an elegant pen and pencil and every convenience connected with writing.  Turning away, she saw beside the fire a large, deep easy-chair, cushioned with purple morocco, and knew it was exactly like one she had often seen in Dr. Asbury’s library.  On the back was pinned a narrow slip of paper, and she read, in the doctor’s scrawling, quaint writing: 

“Child, don’t be too proud to use it.”

She was not.  Throwing herself into the luxurious chair, she broke the seal of a letter received that day from Pauline Mortimor.  Once before, soon after her marriage, a few lines of gay greeting had come, and then many months had elapsed.  As she unfolded the sheet she saw, with sorrow, that in several places it was blotted with tears; and the contents, written in a paroxysm of passion, disclosed a state of wretchedness which Beulah little suspected.  Pauline’s impulsive, fitful nature was clearly indexed in the letter, and, after a brief apology for her long silence, she wrote as follows: 

“Oh, Beulah, I am so miserable; so very, very wretched Beulah, Ernest does not love me!  You will scarcely believe me, Oh, I hardly know how to believe it myself!  Uncle Guy was right; I do not suit Ernest.  But I loved him so very, very dearly, and thought him so devoted to me.  Fool that I was! my eyes are opened at last.  Beulah, it nearly drives me wild to think that I am bound to him for life, an unloved wife.  Not a year has passed since our marriage, yet already he has tired of my ‘pretty face.’  Oh, Beulah, if I could only come to you, and put my arms round your neck, and lay my poor, weary head down on your shoulder, then I could tell you all—­”

[Here several sentences were illegible from tears, and she could only read what followed.]

“Since yesterday morning Ernest has not spoken to me.  While I write he is sitting in the next room, reading, as cold, indifferent, and calm as if I were not perfectly wretched.  He is tyrannical; and because I do not humor all his whims, and have some will of my own, he treats me with insulting indifference.  He is angry now because I resented some of his father’s impertinent speeches about my dress.  This is not the first nor the second time that we have quarreled.  He has an old-maid sister who is forever meddling about my affairs and sneering at my domestic arrangements; and because I finally told her I believed I was mistress of my own house Ernest has never forgiven me.  Ellen (the sister I loved and went to school with) has married and moved to a distant part of the State.  The other members of his family are bigoted, proud, and parsimonious, and they have chiefly made the breach between us.  Oh, Beulah, if I could only undo the