“He will surely come back soon,” she said again and again to herself, while the veil of uncertainty hung black before her troubled vision.  Every day she listened for his footsteps, till heart-sick and weary she returned to her parents, and told them all her grief and all her fears.

An hour later they handed her his letter, received an hour after her departure, and which her father had carried every day in his pocket and forgotten to re-mail to her.

While every one in L—­was rehearsing the great wrong which, in their estimation, Mr. Deane had done his wife, she was eagerly absorbing every word of his warm-hearted letter, which he wrote on the day of his conversation with Mr. Wyman.  Could she have received it before she returned again to her old home, how different would she and her parents have felt towards him.  It was only for them she cared now.  In vain she argued and tried to reinstate him in their good graces; but words failed, and she felt that time and circumstance alone were able to reconcile them.

She longed to go to him, but he had not asked her, and only said at the close: 

“I shall return when I feel that we are ready to love each other as in the past.  Not that I do not love you, Mabel, but I want all the richness of your affection, unclouded by distrust.  We have been much to each other; we shall yet be more.  When I clasp you to my heart again, all your fears will vanish.  Be content to bear this separation awhile, for ’tis working good for us both.”

She read it over a score of times, felt the truthfulness of his words, but could not realize how it was possible for the separation to benefit them.  To her the days seemed almost without end.  To him they were fraught with pleasure, saddened they might be a little with a thought of the events so lately experienced, but gladdened by the sunshine of new scenes, inspirited with new and holy emotions.  It was well for her weak faith that Mrs. Deane did not see him that very evening walking with Miss Weston upon the sea-shore, engaged in close conversation.  She would have questioned how it was possible that under such conditions his love for herself was growing more intense; not thinking, in her shallow philosophy, that the contrast of two lives exhibits more fully the beauties of each, and that it was by this rule she was growing in his affections.

“We must wait awhile for our friends, Miss Weston; I see they are in the rear,” and he spread his shawl upon a rock, motioning her to be seated, close by the foam-white waves.

Mr. Wyman and Florence soon came along.  They had forgotten the presence of every one.  Nothing engaged their attention but the lovely scene before them, while the moon’s light silvered the rippling surface of the waters.  Their communion was not of words as they all sat together that lovely summer eve.  Soul met soul, and was hushed and awed in the presence of so much that was entrancing, and when they separated each was better for the deep enjoyment they had mutually experienced.