Then the kneeling figure seemed to stiffen and grow rigid in a second. Dolly turned her deathly face, with her eyes aflame and dilated. “Did _he_ send it back to me?” she asked, in a slow, fearful whisper. Her expression was so hard and dreadful a one that Aimée sprang to her side and caught hold of her. “No,--no!” she said; “not so bad as that! He would never have done that. He has never had it. He has gone away; we don't know where. It came from the dead-letter office.” Dolly took the letter from her and opened it slowly, and there, as she knelt, read it, word for word, as if it had been something she had never seen before. Then she put it back into the envelope and laid it down. “A dead letter!” she said. “A dead letter! If _he_ had sent it back to me, I think it would have cured me; but _now_ there is no cure for me at all. If he had read it, he would have come,--if he had _only_ read it; but it is a dead letter, and he is gone.” There were no tears, the blow had been too heavy. It was only Aimée who had tears to shed, and it was Dolly who tried to console her in a strained, weary sort of way. “Don't cry,” she said, “it is all over now. Perhaps the worst part of the pain is past. There will be no house at Putney, and the solitary rose-bush will bloom for some one else; they may sell the green sofa, now, as cheap as they will, we shall never buy it. Our seven years of waiting have all ended in a dead letter.” CHAPTER XIV. ~ SEVEN LONG YEARS, BELOVED, SEVEN LONG YEARS. AND so Grif disappeared from the haunts of Vagabondia, and was seen no more. And to Aimée was left the delicate task of explaining the cause of his absence, which, it must be said, she did in a manner at once creditable to her tact and affection for both Dolly and the unconscious cause of all her misery. “There has been a misunderstanding,” she said, “which was no fault of Dolly's, and scarcely a fault of Grif's; and it has ended very unhappily, and Grif has gone away, and just at present it seems as if everything was over,--but I can't help hoping it is not so bad as that.” “Oh, he will come back again--safe enough,” commented Phil, philosophically, holding paint-brush No. 1 in his mouth, while he manipulated with No. 2. “He will come back in sackcloth and ashes; he is just that sort, you know,--thunder and lightning, fire and tow. And they will make it up ecstatically in secret, and pretend that nothing has been the matter, and there will be no going into the parlor for weeks without whistling all the way across the hall.” “I always go in backward after they have had a quarrel,” said Mollie, looking up from a half-made pinafore of Tod's, which, in the zeal of her repentance, she had decided on finishing.