“'Surely, if I go out now, and scour the city, visiting every spot that in any possibility she may visit--the shops, the park, Fourteenth Street, Twenty-third Street--surely, at some point our paths will cross each other, and I shall see her.' Well, I would go out. I would give my thought a trial. I would walk the streets till I was fagged out and foot-sore. I would come back home, with a heart sick for hope deferred.... What fears tormented me all this time, you will surely be able to conceive for yourself. How could I know but that you might have died? One morning at the breakfast-table my uncle glanced up from his newspaper, and, looking very queerly at me, said, 'Here, Elias, here's news for you. An old friend of yours is dead.' With a horrible, sick heart-leap, I thought: 'Ah, she is dead.' With as indifferent an air as I could put on, I asked, 'Who?' He handed me the paper, pointing to the death notices. It cost me all my strength to look; but I looked. Yes; there I saw your name, Redwood. With the courage of despair, I read the notice. 'No; it was not you; it was your father. But how could I know--what assurance had I--that you had not died, too, without my chancing to learn of it? The thought that you might have, got to be a fixed idea in my brain. There was no way by which I could find out. I knew nobody to whom I could apply for information. But at last, one day, by accident, in looking through a newspaper, I again caught sight of your name, Redwood. Ah, how the sight of it made my temples throb! I read that you had been appointed a teacher in the Normal College. So, my doubts on the score of your death were set at rest. It may seem strange to you that I should care so much whether you live or die, since already you are as far and as hopelessly removed from me, as if you were dead; yet the thought that you may die is the blackest of all thoughts to me. I don't know why it is, but I feel that so long as you remain in it, the world will not be quite a blank wilderness to me. There is still some warmth, some beauty, in the light of day, which would go out utterly if you were to die. So long as you live, _I_ want to live. It seems as though there were something to live for; though I can't tell what. But if you were to die--oh, God! if she were to die! I pray God to put an end to my life at once. Oh, don't die, Christine. Oh, to think that if you were to die, I might not hear of it, and might go on living! To think that I can do nothing to make life worth living for you! Nothing to protect you from the danger of death! To think that if you were lying on a sick bed, and I knew it, I could do nothing to soothe you, to nurse you back to health! Oh, Christine! Oh, God grant that at least we may both live until I have finished this letter, and you have read it! I must not die, you must not die, until I have finished, and you have read, this letter.... Once in a great while, once in six or eight weeks, or even seldomer, I would dream about you.