"Do you forget your friends, that you expect a similar fate, Mr. Lacy?" said Ida. His actual presence was the roseleaf upon the mantling cup of bliss. It did not overflow;--tumultuating passions were stilled into a calm, delicious ecstacy. She was more composed than she had been at any time since the reading of the letter,--saw everything, thought of everybody. Carry and Emma went up-stairs arm in arm, and Ida, her baby namesake, folded to her heart, was following Mrs. Dana, when she recollected Laura. She was standing, alone and overlooked, in the hall. "Here, Laura! I confide my darling to your keeping. Gently! don't wake her. Is she not a lovely babe?" "Beautiful!" said Laura, in proud gratification. The sleepy children's suppers were brought up, and they were snug in bed before their elders were prepared for their meal. The gentlemen were in the yard, looking at the belvidere. "Your beacon puzzled us considerably," said Charley to Ida. "It appeared to be upon the summit of a huge, shapeless height. We thought we had lost our road and wandered off to the Enchanted Mountains." "Or that a remnant of Ghebers had an asylum among these hills," said Mr. Lacy. "You should have heard Charley's 'Fierce and high The death-pile blued into the sky, And far away, o'er rock and flood, Its melancholy radiance sent!'" "Was I the only rhapsodizer?" retorted Charley. "Who said, when a figure passed before the light-- "Hafed, like a vision, stood Revealed before the burning pyre, Tall, shadowy, like a Spirit of Fire, Shrined in its own grand element?'" "Why, that was uncle Will!" exclaimed Emma. Amid the burst of laughter that replied, Charley pronounced poetry--"done." "And having descended to real life, perhaps you do not object to more substantial food," said Ida. On the way to the house, some one took her hand. "Has my impatience offended? I could not wait!" said a hasty whisper. "No." "Am I welcome?" "In every sense of the word," was the ingenuous response. This was their plighting. The sun was not up, when Ida raised the parlor windows next morning. Above the dun zone of forest, rested another, of silvery grey vapor, and higher, legions of fleecy cloudlets, from all parts of the heavens, hung motionless, as angels may hover, in rapt adoration, over the crystal walls of the New Jerusalem. He arose! the "bridegroom of earth and brother of time!" and her simile changed--as assuming roseate and golden robes, the expectant host wove themselves into a gorgeous causeway, by which he seemed to mount the heavens. So "Jesus left the dead!" the Sun of Righteousness burst His prison gates; and the shining ones sang the consummation of a world's redemption. She was reading her Bible, alternately with the resplendent leaf Nature unfurled this autumnal Sabbath, when a step dispelled her trance. "Good morning!" said Mr. Lacy. "You are an early riser." "There is my reward!" pointing to the scene without.