Before Helen went, Ben wrote me that he was going to India. It was a favorite journey with the Belemites. By the time the letter reached me he should be gone. Would I bear him in remembrance? He would not forget me, and promised me an Indian idol. In eighteen months he expected to be at home again; sooner, perhaps. P.S. Would I give his true regards to my sister? N.B. The property might be divided according to his grandfather's will, before his return, and he wanted to be out of the way for sundry reasons, which he hoped to tell me some day. I read the letter to Helen and Veronica. Helen laughed, and said "Unstable as water"; but Veronica looked displeased; she closed her eyes as if to recall him to mind, and asked Helen abruptly if she did not like him. "Yes; but I doubt him. With all his strength of character he has a capacity for failure." "I consider him a relation," I said. "_I_ do not own him," said Veronica. "At all events, he is not an affectionate one," Helen remarked. "You have not heard from him in a year." "But I knew that I should hear," I said. "We shall _see_ him," said Veronica, "again." I was dull after I received his letter. My youth grew dim; somehow I felt a self-pity. I found no chance to embalm those phases of sensation which belonged to my period, and I grew careless; Helen's influence went with her. The observances so vital to Veronica, so charming in her, I became utterly neglectful of. For all this a mad longing sometimes seized me to depart into a new world, which should contain no element of the old, least of all a reminiscence of what my experience had made me. CHAPTER XXVI. Alice Morgeson sent for Aunt Merce, asking her to fulfill the promise she had made when she was in Rosville.