As he released her, he gave one longing look at her pretty white face; and trusted, in his heart of hearts, that her parents would tenderly care for her, and fetch her back to life and health. Then, bidding them a whispered adieu, he departed for his own simple abode, with some lingering regrets that he could not have stayed by her bedside and nursed her through her illness. CHAPTER XIII. SECRET WORKINGS OF THE SYSTEM. Peter Dieman was happier than usual one morning, if he could ever be called happy by any possibility of reading such a state of feeling in his otherwise perverse and irascible countenance. Happy! Well, Peter was never more happy in all his born days; but what the extent of that emotion might become in his after life was hard to predict at that time. Whenever he was in good humor, it was his never failing custom to puff at his pipe like a locomotive getting off a dead-center, and to rub his hands with less expenditure of energy, and to squint his eyes with less vigor, and to shut his mouth with less desire to keep it closed. In fact, on such rare occasions, it might be said of him that he was in his subconscious region of retroflection, one peculiarly of his own conception. The cause of all his good humor was nothing more nor less than the refreshing information, imparted to him the day before by Jim Dalls, i. e., that Jim Dalls had decided to go to Europe. Ever since this enlightening piece of intelligence broke in upon the deepness of Peter's outward density of intellect, that gentleman was in a high fever of unemotional genuflexion. Why, mortal man! Peter sat in his chair all that night offering up his devotion to the Gods that They might be propitiated for Their timely intervention. And betimes eating cheese and crackers, and drinking beer, and surfeiting the air with the delicious fumes of his strong pipe. He was, as it were, riding on the back of Alborak into the Seventh Heaven of satisfaction. Not only did he offer up devotion to his Deity, but to other people's Deity as well. Oh, ah, he would think often, but never utter; it being merely his manner of getting rid of superfluous enthusiasm. And his oh, ah's extended on through the night, mixed with cheese, crackers, beer and smoke, to the hour of nine o'clock in the forenoon, at which time he suddenly aroused himself to the position of the hands on the dial of the dollar-clock that hung above his desk, where he could always keep his eyes on its horological exactness. Having noted the time, Eli, after having opened the shop without the least interference with his master's meditations, was summarily summoned into the august presence of Peter through the tintinnabulating medium of a large iron spike applied to a piece of sounding brass suspended by a string from the ceiling on the right hand of his chair. Eli came to attention, with the alertness of an orderly, before Peter, and waited to be commanded.