Dr. Winthrop, almost a prisoner by the bedside of his sick father, wondered why he did not hear from his wife, until he received his mother’s alarming epistle, and then he believed that she must have been too ill to write to him. “Sewer-gas in the house! and they have been living there eight days longer!” he exclaimed, looking very anxious as he finished reading the startling communication. “They must leave the place immediately.” But he realized that Salome was not quite happy, aside from the state of her health. There was something in the tone of madam’s letter, in spite of all her care to disguise her enmity toward his wife, that betrayed this. What she had said about Salome not receiving her advice in a very friendly spirit and refusing to act upon it, indicated it, and he resolved that he would not insist upon her going with them to their home; but out of that poisoned atmosphere, in which he believed she was living, go she must without an hour’s unnecessary delay. And so, on the spur of the moment, he cabled the following message to her: “Close house immediately; go to the —— Hotel; remain there until my return.” The hotel he named was a quiet but well-conducted house, and he had chosen to have her go there because it would be more home-like than a larger and more pretentious place; indeed, it was a kind of family hotel, and its very exclusiveness and remoteness from busy haunts would seem more like the home in Madison Avenue. Having dispatched the message and relieved his mind somewhat, he went back to his apartments and wrote his reasons for it and his wishes more at length, charging her to be very careful of her health and prescribing certain remedies for her to take to counteract the effects of sewer-gas. The letter was full of tenderness and of regret for her illness; it spoke of his anxiety and disappointment on account of not hearing from her, and begged her, if she were not able to write herself, to have Nellie do so; she was to have Nellie go with her to the hotel, though in his haste he had forgotten to mention it in his cable message. If Salome had ever received this precious letter she would have known that all was well—that she was still the dearest object which earth held for her husband. But it was destined to go the way of several others and never into the hands of the young wife, to comfort her almost breaking heart. She was feeling better the morning that the cable message arrived, and, as a steamer was expected that day, she looked forward to a letter with almost feverish eagerness. When the postman came on his afternoon round she hastened out to the door to get the mail. But, as had been usual of late, Evelyn was there before her. “No letter per steamer to-day,” she said, affecting to be greatly disappointed, as she slipped the letters through her hands. “One for mamma, two for me, and—two for True; bills, I suppose.” These last she passed to Salome, and then hastily ran upstairs.