moment out of view, behind the scenes, there, for a moment, to drop his stage-smile and stage-manner. Not unnaturally, it may be conceded. But the question was one of method. How? Consistently with his resolution not to make his wife unhappy, how could it be done? Gradually a plan, simple of conception, and easy of execution, got shaped in Elias's mind. The plan itself, to be sure, involved a certain amount of falsehood; but falsehood which, Elias concluded, was innocuous, and, under the circumstances, justifiable. On Monday, February 16, 1885, at the breakfast table, he made the following announcement to the persons there assembled: “To-morrow I am going out of town. I am going down into the country on Long Island, to do a little winter landscape painting. I shall be gone perhaps a week, perhaps a fortnight.” No opposition was offered. Such questions as were asked, he had anticipated, and so answered with consummate glibness. Next morning a carriage drew up before the door. Elias, with his trunk and his traps, got into it, and was driven off. As the carriage turned the corner, he could see Tillie lingering on the stoop, looking after him. His conscience smote him gently for an instant; and he renewed his vow never to do any thing that could bring sorrow upon his wife. “Poor, little, light-hearted thing,” he soliloquized. “It is easy to satisfy her--'pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.'” And then he dismissed her from his mind. It is probable that, so long as he lived, he never once thought of her again. “I don't know why it is,” the light-hearted and easily satisfied Tillie, as she re-entered the house, confessed to her mother, “but I feel just as blue as if he had gone away forever, instead of only for a fortnight. I feel just perfectly wretched. I've been feeling bad enough for ever and ever so long; but this is just the last straw. I don't believe he cares for me the least bit in the world.” And she buried her face in her mother's bosom, and had a good, long cry. Elias's carriage drove neither to a railway-station, nor to a steamboat-pier. It drove to a lofty, red-brick apartment-house (for bachelors), in West Forty-second Street, “The Reginald,” where Elias had hired a furnished suite of rooms by the month. The falsehood involved by his plan had consisted in saying that he was going to the country. He had no idea of quitting the city. Just so long as Christine Redwood remained in New York, New York would be the only habitable spot on earth to Elias Bacharach. The clerk of the apartment-house conducted Elias to his quarters, and left him there.