On the way he met Harry Tuttle, and could not avoid stopping to exchange a few words with him.. As they talked, he was in a miserable panic of apprehension lest Harry should blurt out something about Madeline's being married. He felt that he could only bear to hear it from Laura's lips. Whenever the other opened his mouth to speak, a cold dew started out on Henry's forehead for fear he was going to make some allusion to Madeline; and when at last they separated without his having done so, there was such weakness in his limbs as one feels who first walks after a sickness. He saw his folly now, his madness, in allowing himself to dally with a baseless hope, which, while never daring to own its own existence, had yet so mingled its enervating poison with every vein that he had now no strength left to endure the disappointment so certain and so near. At the very gate of his father's house he paused. A powerful impulse seized him to fly. It was not yet too late. Why had he come? He would go back to Boston, and write Laura by the next mail, and adjure her to tell him nothing. Some time he might bear to hear the truth, but not to-day, not now; no, not now. What had he been thinking of to risk it? He would get away where nobody could reach him to slay with a word this shadow of a hope which had become such a necessity of life to him, as is opium to the victim whose strength it has sapped and alone replaces. It was too late! Laura, as she sat sewing by the window, had looked up and seen him, and now as he came slowly up the walk she appeared at the door, full of exclamations of surprise and pleasure. He went in, and they sat down. "I thought I'd run out and see how you all were," he said, with a ghastly smile. "I'm so glad you did! Father was wondering only this morning if you were never coming to see us again." He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. "I thought I'd just run out and see you." "Yes, I'm so glad you did!" She did not show that she noticed his merely having said the same thing over. "Are you pretty well this spring?" she asked. "Yes, I'm pretty well." "Father was so much pleased about your patent. He's ever so proud of you." After a pause, during which Henry looked nervously from point to point about the room, he said-- "Is he?" "Yes, very, and so am I." There was a long silence, and Laura took up her work-basket, and bent her face over it, and seemed to have a good deal of trouble in finding some article in it. Suddenly he said, in a quick, spasmodic way-- "Is Madeline married?" Good God! Would she never speak! "No," she answered, with a falling inflection. His heart, which had stopped beating, sent a flood of blood through every artery. But she had spoken as if it were the worst of news, instead of good. Ah! could it be? In all his thoughts, in all his dreams by night or day, he had never thought, he had never dreamed of that.