It was from Clarice, mailed at Rome and directed to Boston, and covered with postmarks, having crossed the ocean twice in quest of him and finding him at last in Paris with his bride, of whose existence Clarice had no knowledge. If she had ever thought to secure Ralph Fenner she had failed. After supposing her married to Paul, he had heard with surprise that the marriage was given up and why, and that Mrs. Percy and Clarice were coming to London. Wishing to return some of their attentions to him when he was in America, he had invited them to Elm Park, his brother’s residence and for the time being his home. Everything which could be done to make their stay agreeable was done. Clarice was so much pleased with life, as she saw it in a first-class English home, and the people she met there, that she would most likely have accepted Ralph had he offered himself to her and taken the chance of his brother’s keeping them at Elm Park. But Ralph was too wise to do that. He admired Clarice, and was very attentive to her, but could not afford to marry her, and she left England a disappointed woman. As she had but few correspondents and was constantly moving from place to place, she did not hear of Paul’s acquittal until she reached Florence, some time in February. There she found a letter from a friend in Washington and a paper containing full particulars of the second trial and acquittal and the attention heaped upon Paul by way of atonement for the injustice done him. He was in Southern California with his father and mother, the paper said, adding that the family talked of going to Japan and from there home through Europe the following summer. Now that she knew Paul was innocent of killing her brother, the disgrace of his having been tried for it did not seem an insurmountable obstacle to an alliance with him, and as time went on she found herself longing for a reestablishment of their old relations and wishing he would write to her. That he would do so eventually she had no doubt. Men like him never love but once, she reasoned, and he had loved her, and by and by he would write to her, or she would meet him somewhere in Europe on his way from Japan. But he did not write, nor did she meet him, nor see his name in the American Register, or on the books of any hotel where she stopped, and she began to long more and more for some news of him and to think she had never loved him as much as she did now, when he might be lost to her. Their stay abroad was prolonged into the second year, and she heard nothing of him except that he was still in California, and that the Ralston House in Oak City and the Boston house on Commonwealth Avenue were closed. At last, when she could bear it no longer, she wrote him a letter, which, had he loved her still, would have thrilled him with ecstasy. But between the past and present there was a gulf in which he had buried all she ever had been to him so deep that it could not be resurrected had there been no Elithe.