"I say that you look better and feel better, within the last hour, than you have done for weeks. You are getting better, and you have neither the honesty to acknowledge it or the grace to thank God for it! Dick Crawford, if you ever die--and I suppose you will, some time--you will commit suicide by taking an over-dose of low spirits!" How flippantly the wild girl spoke!--and yet she was right, and Dick Crawford felt that she was right. The supplying cause of his malady removed, such a lecture, from such ready lips, was precisely the thing that he needed, to break up the habit of despondency--the habit of _enjoying and nursing suffering_ (that phrase may express the fact as well as another) which settles so often like a murky cloud upon the minds of those who have been kept for weeks or months as confirmed invalids, after lives of previous activity. She was right, too, as to the suicide of low spirits. The red devils of Pandemonium may be terrible, fresh from the flames of the pit; but they are nothing to their brothers in blue, who people the air, overcloud the eyes and set up torture-chambers in the brain. Bunyan, in that ever-living "Pilgrim's Progress," paints no tyrant so terrible as "Giant Despair," and no obstruction to the way so fatally impassable as the "Slough of Despond." And we have never read over the sorrowful conclusion of the "Bride of Lammermoor" without believing that the young master of Ravenswood, on that sombre November morning, sunk the sooner and the more fatally in the quicksands of the Kelpie's Flow, from the weight of the leaden heart he carried in his bosom. Suddenly, and before Richard Crawford had quite decided how to answer her last remark, Josephine Harris said, as if the thought had only that instant come to her: "Oh, Dick, I am going to ask a favor, in return for my good opinion. The carriage is in, I believe. May I ring for it, for an hour?" "Certainly," said Crawford. Josephine rung the bell, and the order was given. "It is dusk, you see," said the young girl, apologetically, "and I _must_ go down the Avenue before I go home. Many thanks. Be a good boy and take care of yourself, till I see you again. John will set me down at home when my little errand is over. Good night!" and her kiss fell warm and soft upon his forehead--a sister's kiss, pure and unimpassioned, even if there was no tie of blood between them. Bell Crawford came down stairs and sat by her brother's side when she heard the carriage roll away with her friend. And whither did that carriage roll? Richard Crawford had no idea that Joe's "little errand" could possibly have any connection with himself; and yet it had--a most intimate and important connection, as will be perceived.