Immediately upon the receipt of her letter Mr. Black wrote and asked that the manuscript might be returned to him, apologizing for the mistake. He said the addresses of his contributors were a matter of professional confidence, and he felt bound, therefore, to return the manuscript himself. He made many apologies for having also, through a fault in his office, sent her manuscript to Hugh Robertson, and added that he had just received from that gentleman a request for her address, to which he had replied in the same terms as those of his letter to her. As soon as he received her manuscript he would forward it to her, he said. What he did not say, however, was, that the clerk who had made the mistake had been let off with a lighter reprimand than was usual with Mr. Black, who somehow felt that if he said too much he might be tampering with the designs of Providence. Dr. Hubert sat alone in his office opening his mail--a great pile of letters and papers and medical journals, relative chiefly to his practice and the working of his hospital. Many of the people who wrote to the celebrated surgeon from a distance were much surprised, when they came to see him, to find him so young a man. The great success of his surgical practice had brought him almost suddenly into notice and prominence, and now, although he was under forty, he had a well-established and very successful hospital of his own. He was unmarried, despite the fact of such decided personal attractions as made him almost an idol with the ladies; and the current belief was, that he had been “disappointed in love.” Although this fact was generally accepted, no one had ever been able to identify the object of this theory. If the more intimate of his friends and patients ventured to question him on this point, he would laughingly defy them to point out the lady; but, confident as he was of their inability to do this, he acknowledged, to his own heart, at least, that it was literally true that he had been “disappointed in love.” That was exactly it. No loved woman had ever disappointed him, but his feelings came from the fact that love itself had disappointed him; and the little god, though long expected and looked for, had resolutely turned his back and looked the other way. So now, at last, Dr. Hubert had made up his mind to be independent of Cupid; and having spent much of his force in restless watching and wooing of him, he had determined to secure a greater power of concentration in his profession by bidding him farewell. He was essentially a deliberate and methodical man, however; and as it was his habit to study and investigate every theory and practice of medicine and surgery before he either accepted or rejected it, and even to formulate his grounds of action in writing, he had written out his theory of love, and formulated to himself the grounds of his rejection of it. The chief reason for this rejection was the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of realizing his ideal. Dr.