There will be no use in your coming on here or trying to find me. I have made up my mind. We could never be happy together, so the fewer words said about parting the better. Send your answer regarding the children to the New York post-office. I shall expect it for a week. The money you loaned me is gone with the rest, but they can't turn you out of your house until the mortgage is due, if you pay the interest. Some day I shall pay it back to you. I wish you well, and consider I'm doing us both a service in cutting loose from you. Good-by, EMIL. It seemed to Constance when she had finished this letter as though her heart would stop. Was this reality? Could it be that her husband was abandoning her and her children in cold blood, treating the sacred ties of marriage as lightly as though they were straws? Alas! his cruel words stared her in the face, freezing her soul, which had been sick for days over his unexplained absence; sick from dread. Yes, she had guessed; but she had put the horror from her as impossible, despite his hints. Unbalanced and embittered as he was, he could not be so unkind. Now she was face to face with certainty; there was no room for hope. It was true; so cruelly inhumanly true that her brain felt dazed and numb. She gazed at his writing stony-eyed and appalled, limp with dismay and forlornness. To avoid falling she put out her hand to the table, and the contact of her own flesh served to readjust her consciousness. Seating herself she swept her fingers across her brow to rally her senses, and read the letter again slowly. Then mortification succeeded dismay, and resentment followed close on mortification. The wounded pride of the wife, the indignation of the mother protesting for her children asserted themselves, causing her to flush to the roots of her hair and her pulses to tingle. Coward! Unnatural father! What had she done to deserve this? What had they done, helpless innocents? Give them up to him? Her children, now the only joy of her life? Never. They could not both have them. Why should he who had left them in the lurch have either? She could hear their prattle in the adjoining room, poor little souls, unconscious of their misery. Then her sense of wounded pride and her anger were forgotten in the agony of a possible separation from her offspring, and in the loss of her husband's love, and her tense nerves gave way. "Oh, Emil, my husband, how could you?" she moaned, and burying her face in her hands she let sorrow have full sway. [Illustration: "Oh, Emil, my husband, how could you?" she moaned]