There was no mistaking the meaning of Jessie's letter to my mother. It was intended to snap at once and for ever the bonds which united us. She had set herself free from her miserable thraldom, and she was not to be wooed back. 'It will be useless, if you find where I am, endeavouring to prevail upon me to return. I would starve rather than enter the house again.' I heard her speak these words in sharp incisive tones, and I knew too well that she was not to be turned from her purpose. All was over between us, and this day, which I had fondly imagined was to be the happiest in our lives, had sealed the destruction of all my hopes. Two trivial circumstances recalled me to the realities of the scene. One was the ticking of the watch which I had intended as a birthday present for Jessie; the other was a slight rustling of paper. I had observed, when uncle Bryan entered the room with the letter for my mother, that he held another paper in his hand, which must have been addressed to himself. It was the rustling of this paper which now attracted my attention. Uncle Bryan had opened it, and was reading it. He could have read but a very few lines when a ghastly pallor overspread his features, and his hands trembled from excess of agitation. Every muscle in his face was quivering, and even in the midst of my own suffering these signs of suffering in him did not escape me. They did not move me to pity; they stirred me rather to a more bitter resentment against him. He, and he alone, was the cause of all my misery; he, and he alone, had brought this blight upon my life. I did not know, until I attempted to move towards him, that my mother's arms were round me. I had no distinct intention of raising my hand against him, but it might have occurred, and my mother feared it and clung to me convulsively. I released myself from her arms, and I stood before him, barring the way, for I detected in him a desire to leave the room unobserved. He gazed at me in a weak uncertain manner; all his old strength and sternness of character seemed to have deserted him, and he was suddenly transformed into a weak and worn old man. That his sorrow-stricken face should have won sympathy from my mother and Josey West--as I saw clearly it had--I construed into an additional wrong against myself, committed not by them, but by him. It inflamed me the more; I felt that my passion must have vent, and that it was impossible for me to be silent. 'Let me pass.' I did not hear the words, for his throat was parched, and refused to give them utterance; but I knew that he had striven to speak them. 'Not till you have heard what I have to say,' was my reply, as I stood before him.