I shed grateful tears that night before I went to sleep. How I longed to write to Ellen of the incident; but I had resolved not once to disregard her request that the whole subject be a sealed one. And I trusted that Alice would remember to tell it. Well I might! At breakfast Alice said,-- "Oh, papa, I told mamma that you carried her to the party in your breast-pocket; that is, you carried her letter!" I fancied that John's cheek flushed a little as he said,-- "You might tell mamma that papa carries her everywhere in his breast-pocket, little girlie, and mamma would understand." I think from that day I never feared for Ellen's future. I fancied, too, that from that day there was a new light in John Gray's eyes. Perhaps it might have been only the new light in my own; but I think when a man knows that he has once, for one hour, forgotten a promise to meet a woman whose presence has been dangerously dear to him, he must be aware of his dawning freedom. The winter was nearly over. Ellen had said nothing to us about returning. "Dr. Willis tells me that, from what Ellen writes to him of her health, he thinks it would be safer for her to remain abroad another year," said John to me one morning at breakfast. "Oh, she never will stay another year!" exclaimed I. "Not unless I go out to stay with her," said John, very quietly. "Oh, John, could you?" and, "Oh, papa, will you take me?" exclaimed Alice and I in one breath. "Yes," and "yes," said John, laughing, "and Sally too, if she will go." He then proceeded to tell me that he had been all winter contemplating this; that he believed they would never again have so good an opportunity to travel in Europe, and that Dr. Willis's hesitancy about Ellen's health had decided the question. He had been planning and deliberating as silently and unsuspectedly as Ellen had done the year before. Never once had it crossed my mind that he desired it, or that it could be. But I found that he had for the last half of the year been arranging his affairs with a view to it, and had entered into new business connections which would make it not only easy, but profitable, for him to remain abroad two years. He urged me to go with them, but I refused. I felt that the father and the mother and the children ought to be absolutely alone in this blessed reunion, and I have never regretted my decision, although the old world is yet an unknown world to me. John Gray was a reticent and undemonstrative man, in spite of all the tenderness and passionateness in his nature. But when he bade me good-by on the deck of the steamer, as he kissed me he whispered:-- "Sally, I shall hold my very breath till I see Ellen. I never knew how I loved her before." And the tears stood in his eyes.