Four days that happy dream lasted; and even now Horace looks back on those four dream-days as days of unutterable joy and blessedness. He has a little portfolio which Hester herself made for him, and on the back of which she painted his own monogram. It lies among his choicest treasures, and is never handled but with the most dainty care. It contains every note she wrote him--five in all--as those blessed days went by. Them it contains--ah, the pity!--four little sunny songs which Horace wrote to her on four of those evenings, and which he sent to her on the four mornings, with the bunch of flowers which she found at the front-door as she threw it open. These the poor girl had to give back to him. And all this is tied with a bit of ribbon, which is stained yet by the moisture on the stems of the flowers it tied together,--a little bunch of roses which Hester gave to him. For, as you must hear, these four days came to an end. Old Mr. Bryan came home--"old" he was called, in the fresh and active phrase of a young community, because he was older than John Bryan the miller. In truth, our Mr. Bryan was forty-five. He came home--from no one knew where. He was in low spirits: that all men saw as he left the railroad station--the dépôt, as they called it. The boy who drove him to his home--that is, who drove the horse which dragged the wagon in which old Bryan was carried to his home--this boy, I say, did not dare allude to Horace's good news. Pretty Hester came running to meet him at the gate, fresh as a rose and glad as a sunbeam; but she saw that all was wrong. All the same, everything was pleasant and cheerful; the children were neat and nice in their best clothes, the supper was perfect, and no returning conqueror had ever a more happy welcome. Before they slept, even to her downcast, not to say cross, father, Hester told her story,--her story and Horace's. But old Bryan took it very hardly. It was all nonsense, he said. She must not think of weddings. His was no house to be married from. He was ruined: those infernal Swartwouts and Dousterswivels, or whatever else may have been the names of the swindlers who had fooled him, had cleaned him out; and the sooner the town knew he was ruined, and the world, why, the better, he supposed. Poor old Bryan was really to be pitied this time. Often as he had fallen, he had never fallen so far; and it certainly seemed as if he had fallen into mud and slime so thick and so deep, in a bog so utterly without bottom, that for him there was no recovery. "No time to talk of weddings." This was all old Bryan would say. When Horace came to plead, it was no better. There was a time when old Bryan had liked Horace. If any man knew how to manage him, it was Horace. But now he was simply unmanageable, and too soon the reason appeared.