"Good-by, you’ll not see me again, Jack, so good-by, Jack, forever. And in time, though you’ll never forget me nor cease to love me, you will do as I said; for yours is youth and love and strength, and they must be mated. When you can think of me without tears, without sorrow or pity, but as one who has lived and is gone—only as the memory of a sweet dream that might have been—then, dear, dear Jack, remember the last request I made of you, remember to make Elsie happy; and in time—in time, Jack, oh, what a love-maker he is! be happy yourself. Hold me a moment, just a moment to your heart—then—kiss me again and say with me the little prayer Aunt Lucretia used to make us say, holding hands in the long ago." Holding her face against mine, and with clasped hands as of old, we said: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." Although the words of Eloise came to me again and again as I rode home that night, I was never so happy, nor so hopeful. Yet she had said, "Good-by, good-by, Jack, I shall never see you again." "I shall see her to-morrow night," my heart kept saying over and over. "I will not give her up; I will marry her, if I have to carry her in my arms through life!" But the next night when I rode over my grandfather met me at the door. He greeted me with petulant indifference. Both Eloise and Aunt Lucretia had left that morning—where, he did not know. She was a hopeless cripple with a broken spine, and was carried away in a cot to some institution where she might be cared for properly for the balance of her life. I forgave the old man because he was old—the reiterated statement that he had made allowance for her care himself, for although she was no blood kin, and had no claim upon him, she had been with him all her life, and was a ward of his daughter.