back-lookings to any younger lover left behind, know that naught you could bestow, can ever equal the world of love and feeling which I long to lavish upon you from my heart of hearts. But if another has already won upon your affections too much for you to give an undivided response to my appeal, then by all the purity and innocence of your nature, forget I have ever marred the past or disturbed the present by any word warmer than that of a father. > > “I shall not meet you at breakfast and possibly not at dinner tomorrow, but when evening comes I shall look for my soul’s dearer and better half, or my childless manhood’s nearest and most cherished friend, as God pleaseth and your own heart and
Miss Belinda was very much surprised to be awakened early the next morning, by a pair of loving arms clasped yearningly about her neck.
Looking up, she descried Paula kneeling beside her bed in the faint morning light, her cheeks burning, and her eyelids drooping; and guessing perhaps how it was, started up from her recumbent position with an energy strongly suggestive of the charger, that smells the battle afar off.
“What has happened?” she asked. “You look as if you had not slept a wink.”
For reply Paula pulled aside the curtain at the head of her bed, and slipped into her hand Mr. Ensign’s letter. Miss Belinda read it conscientiously through, with many grunts of approval, and having finished it, laid it down with a significant nod, after which she turned and surveyed Paula with keen but cautious scrutiny. “And you don’t know what answer to give,” she asked.