“Within a very few hours from this, my own dear Elsie, you will be released and married. And now let me tell you, my own dear child, my reasons for advising and aiding you in this step. It is not only, my Elsie, that your heart has long been given to Magnus; that your hand has long been pledged to him with the approbation of both your parents; that your happiness is concerned in being united to him; that your honor is implicated in keeping faith with him; it is not, either, that it would be a heinous wickedness to forsake your betrothed at the very moment that fortune forsakes him, and in the hour of his greatest adversity; it is not that this very desertion of yours would shake his faith in all that is good and true in heaven or on earth, palsy his energy and enterprise, and thus do him a serious mortal and social injury. And, on the other hand, it is not that you do not love Lionel. No, Elsie, it is simply because Magnus is entirely the better man of the two,—better, incomparably better,—physically, mentally, morally, religiously. Magnus is healthful, strong, handsome, energetic, highly intellectual, purely moral, profoundly religious; and he loves you completely. Lionel is broken in constitution, evidently by excess; indolent, selfish, voluptuous, yet irritable and often violent. His interest in you is a low compound of vanity, cupidity, and sense—it would be false and profane to call it by the sacred name of love. Magnus would make you better and happier, in loving you greatly, in elevating your moral and religious nature, while Lionel would draw you down to the misery and degradation of his own low nature. My child, my one lone child, it is for this consideration that I bar you from wealth, luxury, ease, adulation, and give you to the stern but kindly discipline of poverty, toil, and privation—with love by your side, to lighten all your labors and God above you to reward them. May God love you, my only child! my little Elsie!” No tear-drop blotted this paper, though her tears had fallen thick, and fast, and blindingly, while she wrote it. She had turned her head away; for no sign of sorrow should wound and weaken Elsie in the letter written to comfort and sustain her. She had turned her head away, and the tears had rained upon her lap. Many times she had arisen from her writing desk and fallen, overcome with grief, upon the bed. But it was done. She had succeeded. And there was nothing upon the paper or in the letter to betray the anguish of mind in which it was written. Trying to steer as blamelessly as she could through her labyrinth of duties, Alice would not call one of the servants, all of whom had been expressly forbidden to approach the attic, but took the paper herself, went feebly up the stairs, and supporting herself by the balustrades, she reached the topmost landing, and went to the door of Elsie’s room.