And she was lost to him now, lost through his pride, lost through his vanity, lost through such dense and inexcusable stupidity as never before possessed or afflicted a man. He had taken her girlish doubts as final. He had thought to exhibit his manly pride—which was, after all, only conceit of self—as an offset to her presuming to question the possibility of her being possessed by a great love for him. Coward that he was to surrender this glorious creature without an effort. Dolt that he was to so mistake her maidenly hesitancy. And she—dear heart—had loved him after all. She had condescended to summon him, and he had never received the message. What had she thought of his failure to respond? What must she have thought of him, save that he was a cruel, conceited creature unworthy of her love? What humiliation his unexplained silence must for a time have brought to her gentle spirit! What wreck and misery had not this miscarriage of her missive brought to his life! If he could have identified the clerk or postman whose carelessness had misplaced her letter, he would have beaten him in his fury, and he wished for an ax that he might hew and batter to splinters the inanimate desk whose machinery had been instrumental in wrecking two lives. Were they hopelessly wrecked? He caught his breath at the thought. He at least was free, and whatever else might come never would he be otherwise. Never should wile of woman enchant him, never should desire for home and love and perpetuation of race and name beguile him. He would walk lonely to the gates of the eternal morning, and wait for her beyond the portal, and carry her soul upon the pinions of his immortal love to the uttermost confines of ether, where no entrapments or environments of earth could follow or molest them, and in the glow of the astral light he would claim her as his own, and give himself to her forever and ever. Ellen’s letter released the passion which had been locked for ten years in the silent chambers of David Morning’s soul, and it possessed the man, and mastered him with throes of bitter agony and throbs of ecstatic delight. His cheeks were wet with the tears of disappointment, and again to the very center of him he laughed with joy as he covered the letter with kisses. “She loved me, my darling, my own, she loved me!” he cried. “Maybe she loves me yet!” and again his heart beat wildly. “For ten years she remained unmated. But yesterday she married this German nobleman, this Baron Von Eulaw. Surely love could not have moved her to the union. Surely with her nature she could not have forgotten her first love. She was outraged and humiliated and incensed at the silence and seeming indifference of the man she really loved, and so she married, for reasons common enough in society.”