A letter or two dispatched at random relieve the excess of your fever, until, with practice, these random letters have even less heat in them than the heat of your study or of your business. Grief—thank God!—is not so progressive or so cumulative as joy. For a time there is a pleasure in the mood with which you recall your broken hopes, and with which you selfishly link hers to the shattered wreck; but absence and ignorance tame the point of your woe. You call up the image of Nelly adorning other and distant scenes. You see the tearful smile give place to a blithesome cheer, and the thought of you that shaded her fair face so long fades under the sunshine of gayety, or, at best, it only seems to cross that white forehead like a playful shadow that a fleecy cloud-remnant will fling upon a sunny lawn. As for you, the world, with its whirl and roar, is deafening the sweet, distant notes that come up through old choked channels of the affections. Life is calling for earnestness, and not for regrets. So the months and the years slip by; your bachelor habit grows easy and light with wearing; you have mourned enough to smile at the violent mourning of others, and you have enjoyed enough to sigh over their little eddies of delight. Dark shades and delicious streaks of crimson and gold color lie upon your life. Your heart, with all its weight of ashes, can yet sparkle at the sound of a fairy step, and your face can yet open into a round of joyous smiles that are almost hopes—in the presence of some bright-eyed girl. But amid this there will float over you from time to time a midnight trance, in which you will hear again with a thirsty ear the witching melody of the days that are gone, and you will wake from it with a shudder into the cold resolves of your lonely and manly life. But the shudder passes as easy as night from morning. Tearful regrets and memories that touch to the quick are dull weapons to break through the panoply of your seared, eager and ambitious manhood. They only venture out like timid, white-winged flies when night is come, and at the first glimpse of the dawn they shrivel up and lie without a flutter in some corner of your soul. [Illustration] And when, years after, you learn that she has returned—a woman—there is a slight glow, but no tumultuous bound of the heart. Life and time have worried you down like a spent hound. The world has given you a habit of easy and unmeaning smiles. You half accuse yourself of ingratitude and forgetfulness; but the accusation does not oppress you. It does not even distract your attention from the morning journal. You can not work yourself into a respectable degree of indignation against the old gentleman—her guardian. You sigh—poor thing! and in a very flashy waistcoat you venture a morning call.