“Are you at liberty to state the reasons?” asked Miss Loring.

Mrs. Denison thought for some time.

“Do you desire to hear them?” she then asked, looking steadily into the face of her visitor.

“I do,” was firmly answered.

“Then I will place his letter to me in your hands.  But not now.  When you leave, it will be time enough.  You must read it alone.”

A sudden gleam shot across the face of Jessie.  But it died like a transient meteor.

“I will return home now, Mrs. Denison,” she said, with a manner that showed a great deal of suppressed feeling.  “You will excuse me, of course.”

“Cannot you remain longer?  I shall regret your going,” said her kind friend.

“Not in my present state of mind.  I can see from your manner that I have an interest in the contents of that letter, and I am impatient to know them.”

It was all in vain that Jessie Loring sought to calm her feelings as she returned homeward with the letter of Paul Hendrickson held tightly in her hand.  The suspense was too much for her.  On entering the house of her aunt, she went with unusual haste to her own room, and without waiting to lay aside any of her attire, sat down and opened the letter.  There was scarcely a sign of life while she read, so motionless did she sit, as if pulsation were stilled.  After reading it to the last word she commenced folding up the letter, but her hands, that showed a slight tremor in the beginning, shook so violently before she was done, that the half closed sheet rattled like a leaf in the wind.  Then tears gushed over the letter, falling upon it like rain.

There was no effort on the part of Jessie to repress this wild rush of feeling.  Her heart had its own way for a time.  In the deep hush that followed, she bowed herself, and kneeled reverently, lifting a sad face and tear-filled eyes upwards with her spirit towards Heaven.  She did not ask for strength or comfort—­she did not even ask for herself anything.  Her soul’s deep sympathies were all for another, towards whom a long cherished love had suddenly blazed up, revealing the hidden fires.  But she prayed that at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances, he might be kept pure.

“Give him,” she pleaded, “patient endurance and undying hope.  Oh, make his fortitude like the rock, but his humanities yielding and all pervading as the summer airs laden with sweetness.  Sustain him by the divine power of truth.  Let Thy Word be a staff in his hand when travel-worn, and a sword when the enemy seeks his life.  In his own strength he cannot walk in this way; in his own strength he cannot battle with his foes—­but in Thy strength he will be strong as a lion, and as invincible as an army.”

After rising from her knees, Miss Loring, over whose spirit a deep quietude had fallen, re-opened Hendrickson’s letter and read it again; and not once only but many times, until every word and sentence were written on her memory.