you adieu; trusting that my father may not be inexorable under your kind ministry, I shall wait with some impatience for your reply.” Such was the heartless, yet craftily worded letter which was put into Minnie’s hands, as she sat watching beside the sick-bed of poor Mr. Woodley, who had been stricken with paralysis, and now lay between life and death. It would require a colder heart and more graphic pen than mine to describe her feelings. Fortunately for her Mr. Woodley was utterly insensible, and there was no one to witness her emotion. When the doctor came to visit the patient at evening, he looked amazed at the change which he saw, not in the sick man, but in the gentle nurse. “You are ill, Miss Clifton, suffer me to send a nurse for Mr. Woodley, and let me persuade you to go to bed.” “If I am not better tomorrow, doctor, I will accept your kind offer, but I would rather watch him to-night!” The next morning the good doctor found Minnie looking as pallid as a corpse, though she had now obtained more control over her nerves. She refused to give up her charge, but she requested the doctor to write to Mr. Hubert Woodley and inform him of the event which had befallen his father. In the course of the following day came a Washington paper. With trembling hands Minnie unfolded it and looked at the list of marriages. She had conjectured truly; Hubert had been married the day after he wrote the letter which had crushed that gentle and loving heart. The doctor’s letter did not reach Hubert until his return from his bridal tour. Leaving his wife among her relatives to lament over the interruption which this untoward event would necessarily make in her wedding festivities, he hastened to his father’s bedside. But Mr. Woodley had lost the use of every faculty. He did not know his son—he could not lift his hand to welcome him—all that remained to him of life was the merest animal existence; he could take food and sleep, but all hope of restoration to reason and the use of his limbs was out of the question. “He may linger thus for years,” said the doctor, in reply to Hubert’s questioning. Hubert could ill bear to see his father’s distorted visage, but it was worse, far worse, for him to look upon the ghastly pallor which had settled on the face of Minnie. She scarcely raised her eyes to his face, and the hand she extended toward his proffered grasp was cold and nerveless. He could not stand it. In three days he was again in Washington, and as his father was so accommodating as to live on, the round of projected gayeties was not interrupted. Hubert daily received tidings from the doctor respecting his father, until it was decided that death was yet far distant, and this living death might be dragged out through many months, when all present anxiety ceased.