"Oh, yes," answered the poor girl--"worse than torturing me! I could bear his personal cruelty, for I have grown used to it. But he has just made me lose my last hope in life, and I have nothing left me but to die!" "Your last hope?" echoed Carlton Brand. "What? Has Mr. Bladesden--" "Mr. Bladesden has just been here," answered Eleanor Hill, choking down the grief and indignation that were so painfully combating each other in her throat, dropping her head as she had done a few minutes before in the presence of the merchant, and holding out in her hand the crushed letter which Bladesden had dropped as he left the house. "Mr. Bladesden has just been here, and he brought this letter to read to me. It had been sent to his store, and he received it this morning. You can see, after reading it, what hope in life he has left me!" "Curse him! He deserves eternal perdition, and will find it!" Carlton Brand had momentarily forgotten his own troubles in the evident anguish of the young girl, just as a few moments before she had merged all those sorrows in anxiety for his personal safety. He took the letter she handed, smoothed out the crumpled folds made in it by the grasp of anger and shame, and read the damning words that follow--words so black and dastardly that one of the fiends from the lower pit might come back to earth to clear away from his name the suspicion that he had ever penned them. A few sentences of this _bona fide_ communication are necessarily omitted, in an interest easily understood: WEST PHILADELPHIA, _June --, 1863._ MR. NATHAN BLADESDEN: