"I should be proud to have Judge Ashburton Todhunter's approval of any remark of mine, but in the meanwhile it would be a greater pleasure to me to have you return at once to Macdougal Street, where, no doubt, Mrs. Morgan is delaying dinner for you." "Say no more, Wesley. I'll never set foot in your house again, as sure as my name is Flagg--and long may I wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave." "He is a kind of Flagg that I don't wish to have wave over MY home," said Mrs. Wesley, descending the stairs as my cousin with painful care closed the door softly behind him. So the end was come. It had come with less unpleasantness than I should have predicted. The ties of kindred, too tightly stretched, had snapped; but they had snapped very gently, so to speak. V Washington Flagg was as good as his word, which is perhaps not a strong indorsement. He never again set foot in my house. A week afterward I found that he had quitted Macdougal Street. "He has gone South," said Mrs. Morgan. "Did he leave no message for me?" "He didn't leave a message for nobody." "Did he happen to say to what part of the South he was bound?" "He said he was going back to Dixie's Land, and didn't say no more." That was all. His departure had been as abrupt and unlocked for as his arrival. I wondered if he would turn up again at the end of another twenty years, and I wondered how he had paid his travelling expenses to the land of the magnolia and the persimmon. That mystery was solved a few days subsequently when a draft (for so reasonable a sum as not to be worth mentioning to Clara) was presented to me for payment at my office. Washington Flagg was gone, but his shadow was to linger for a while longer on our household. It was difficult to realize that the weight which had oppressed us had been removed. We were scarcely conscious of how heavy it had been until it was lifted. I was now and then forced to make an effort not to expect the colonel to dinner.