"I need not relate, even if I could do so, the outpouring of long-pent emotions which relieved the yearning love and haunting memories of sad, silent, lingering years. It is enough to tell you briefly of the story which was repeated in fragments through many hours of unfamiliar bliss. Soon after my departure from New Orleans, the father of Blanche, with the stern authority which many parents exercise over the matrimonial affairs of their daughters, insisted upon her forming an alliance to which the opposition of her own heart was the only objection. So trifling an impediment was decisively put aside by him, and Blanche, having delayed the marriage as long as possible, until the time fixed for my return was past, and unable to plead any open acknowledgment on my part which could justify her refusal, had no alternative but to obey. 'I confess,' said she, in faltering tones, 'that, after my fate was fixed, and I was parted from you, as I believed for life, I tried to believe that the love which had given so slight witness in words to its truth and fervor must have faded entirely away, and that I was forgotten, and perhaps supplanted. And therefore, in the varied pursuits and pleasures of my new sphere, and in the indulgence and kindness which ministered to the outer, but, alas! never to the inner life, I sought happiness, and I, too, like yourself, strove to forget. Ah! that art of forgetting, which the Athenian coveted as the best of boons,--when was it ever found through effort or desire? In all scenes of beauty or of excitement, in the allurements of society, in solitude and in sorrow, my heart still turned to you with ceaseless longing, as if you alone could touch its master-chord, and waken the harmonies which were struggling for expression. By slow degrees, as I learned to dissever you from the material world, there came a conviction of the nearness of your spirit, sometimes so positive that I would waken from a reverie, in which I was lost to sights and sounds around me, with a sense of having been in your actual presence. I was aware of an effect rather than of an immediate consciousness,--as if the magnetism of your touch had swept over me, cooling the fever of my brain, and charming to deep tranquillity my troubled heart. And thus I learned, through similar experience, the same belief as yours. I have felt the continuous nearness, the inseparable union of our spirits, as plainly as I feel it now, with my hand clasped in yours, and reading in your eyes the unutterable things which we can never hope to speak, because they are foreshadowings of another existence. "What I possess I see afar off lying, And what I lost is real and undying." The material presence is indeed very dear, but I believe that it is not essential to the perpetuity of that love which is nurtured through mutual and perfect understanding.'