“Ah, my darling, if you would but have come with me, how much happier I should have been!” he wrote most plaintively; adding: “Do you know that your letter was most cruel? It was filled up with my friend Desha and the handsome unknown who saved your life. Ah, my love, do not let either of these men steal you from me, for the loss of you would wreck my life! I do not care to hear about them. It is news of you, dearest, for which my lonely heart is hungry. If you could see me looking at your beautiful photograph and kissing it over and over, you would pity me and write some sweet loving words to show that you have not forgotten me in my enforced exile from your side!” Viola’s heart was touched by the pathos of the poor fellow’s letter, and she brought out his photograph and looked at it with tender eyes, saying, as she often did: “Poor fellow, how he loves me! He has a warm, true heart!” And she thought bitterly of that cold, indifferent young statesman who had resisted all the allurements of her beauty, and who was doubtless wedded to his soaring ambitions. In her bitterness at Desha, she wrote very tenderly to Florian, filling his heart with delight, and quieting his uneasiness by saying: “You need not be jealous of Professor Desha; I seldom see him any more. He devotes himself to congressional affairs, and never goes into society now, so I suppose he has forgotten my existence. As for the young man who saved my life, he has never divulged his identity, and does not intend to, I suppose, and I should never give him another thought only that gratitude demands it. Ah, Florian, how I miss you these dull days while I must stay at home and get strong! It is so lonely that I get more time to think about my love for you. Yes, I do love you; you need never doubt that! I look at your photograph often, and kiss it, too, as you do mine! I think that whenever you come back I will let you announce our engagement and set the wedding-day. I wonder what Professor Desha will think when he hears it.” Florian was in the seventh heaven when he received that letter. It was the tenderest one she ever wrote him, for very soon she went out again into society, and amid her pleasures and her engagements had little time for letters, so that he found her a most unpunctual correspondent, though he entreated her to write frequently to cheer his dull days passed by the bedside of his invalid father and trying to comfort his grieving mother. But whenever the brevity or the carelessness of her later letters grieved him, he turned to the sweet, tender one written under the impetus of her resentment against Desha, and found solace in the words: “Yes, I do love you--you need never doubt that. I look at your photograph often, and kiss it, too, as you do mine. I think that whenever you come back I will let you announce our engagement and set the wedding-day.”