Mr. Lisle complied, and waited until his boy was brought to him in a more presentable condition; then he went away, very wroth indeed in heart, but outwardly calm and composed. CHAPTER X. "A DREAM WHICH WAS NOT ALL A DREAM." As the missionary journeyed northward, his mind emerged from the gloom of the last few days. It naturally turned upon the young girl who was so soon to become his bride, and in this connection life began again to assume its rose-tints of old, and he was led to wonder how it was he had so given way to grief and sadness. In recalling the trials and disadvantages to which his young bride would be exposed at the mission, a bright thought occurred to him. An American housekeeper would be invaluable, and Miss Toothaker arose before him. She would no doubt prove an excellent manager, and she was so unprepossessing in every way, she would be unlikely to be appropriated by any widowed missionary. It has been seen already that for Philip St. Leger to think and to act were but quick, consecutive steps; it was so in this case. Upon his return to Troy he called upon Madame X---- and explained his wishes. Miss Toothaker was consulted, and accepted his proposition at once; she would be on missionary ground at all events. True, she was conditionally engaged to marry a Mr. Freeman Clarke, who was an itinerant preacher. She had insisted that he should become a missionary. He had consented to go as missionary to the Western frontiers. This did not meet Miss Toothaker's views; foreign missionary or nothing. Mr. Clarke's conscience did not send him to any Booriooboolah Gha, he said. The engagement had been for some time in this state of contention, when the proposal of going to Turkey as "assistant" put an end to it. Miss Arethusa retired to her room triumphantly, and exultingly wrote to her lover the facts in the case--except that she left him to infer that she was going to Turkey, as she had always wished, a missionary's wife. Now that Mr. Freeman Clarke's "blessing had taken its flight," it all at once assumed that brightness of which the poet speaks. He would have argued and urged, even consented to have gone to the ends of the earth, but he saw from his lady's letter it was too late. He solaced himself somewhat by replying to her dolorously, hoping that she might perceive his heart was broken and be sorry. He closed loftily by saying: "You advise me, my dear Arethusa--allow me to call you thus for the last time--to find a heart worthier and better. It was unkind in you to urge upon me an impossibility. None but Napoleon ever scorned the word impossible."