"One thing you may well believe--that, before you will have had this letter many days, I shall follow it. There will be no rest for me till I touch American soil. An old passion, only half stifled under a load of hopelessness, springs into fresh life again, and burns, less brightly, perhaps, but I can almost believe, more deeply and fervently than ever. I was consoling myself yesterday with trying to think that blows were my mind's best medicine; but I feel now, that after being broken with the plough and harrow, it will yield the better for the summer sunshine. Yet I am afraid to flatter myself with too bright a prospect. Miss Leslie loved me, and the planets in their course are not more constant and unswerving; but I cannot tell what may have been the effect of so much suffering, or what determination, fatal to my hope, it may not have impelled her to embrace. She will soon know my mind. I have written to her, and begged her to send her reply to New York, where, if my reckoning does not fail, I shall arrive about the middle of June. By it I shall be able to judge to what fortune I am to look forward. "You have so lately passed your own anxieties, that you will easily appreciate mine. I can wish for them nothing more than that they may find as happy an issue; and I will take it as an earnest of the intentions of destiny towards me that it has just brought together my two best friends." CHAPTER LXXIII. Joy never feasts so high As when his first course is of misery.--_Suckling_. Again the Jersey heights rose on the eye of Morton, and the woods and villas of Staten Island. Again the broad breast of New York harbor opened before him, sparkling in the June sun; the rugged front of the Castle, and the tapering spire of Trinity. He bethought him of his last return, and its unforgotten blackness threw its shadow across his mind. He turned, doubting and tremulous, towards the future; but here his horizon brightened as with the sunrise, shooting to the zenith its shafts of tranquil light. Meanwhile, the telegraph had darted to Boston a notice that the approaching steamer had been signalled off the coast. Meredith took the night train to meet his friend; but, arriving, he learned that Morton was already on shore. Driving from one hotel to another, he found, at length, the latter's resting-place. "Shall I take up your name, sir?" "No, show me his room; I will go myself." He knocked at the door. There was no answer. He knocked again, and a voice replied suddenly, like that of a man roused from a revery. He entered; and at the next moment, Morton grasped his hand. "You have found yourself again," said Meredith; "you have grown back again to your old look." Morton's eye glistened. "I think I know the handwriting of that letter. Miss Leslie's,--I will call her so still--it is hers, is it not?" "Yes." "She writes, I trust, what you hoped to hear." "All that I hoped, and much more."