ANTHONY sat late into the night composing an explanatory and farewell letter to Eliza:

“Your family would laugh at me,” he wrote; “I couldn't show them a dollar. And although my father has done a great deal for me he wouldn't do this. I couldn't expect him to. Mother might help, she is like you, but I could not very well live between two women, could I? The only hope is California for a couple of years. You know how much I want to stay with you, how hard this is to write, when our engagement, everything, is so new and wonderful. But it would only be harder later. If I had seen you this afternoon I would never have left you. I am going to-morrow night. This will come to you in the morning, and I will be home if you send me a message. I would like to see you again before I go away in order to come back to you forever. I would like to hear you say again that you love me. Sometimes I think it never really happened. If I don't see you again before I leave, remember I shall never change, I shall love you always and not forget the least thing you said. I wish now I had studied so that I could write better. Remember that I belong to you, when you want me I will come to you if it's around the world, I would come to you if I were dead I think. Good-bye, dear, dear Eliza, until tomorrow anyhow, and that's a long while to be without seeing you or hearing your voice.”

At the announcement of his agreement to go West, the attitude of his father had changed greatly; his hand continually sought Anthony's shoulder; he consulted gravely, as it were with an equal, with regard to trains, precautions, new climates. His mother busied herself over his clothes, her rare speech brusque and hurried. To Anthony she seemed suddenly old, grey; her hands trembled, and necessary stitches were uneven.

He was aware that the mail for Hydrangea House was collected before noon, and he sat expectantly in the room overlooking the street. It was dark and cool, there were creamy tea roses in the Canton jar now, while in the street it was hot and bright. A sere engraving of Joseph Bonaparte in regal robes gazed serenely from the wall. The hour for lunch arrived without any message from Eliza. Throughout the afternoon he dropped his pressing affairs find descended to the street... nothing.

His heart grew heavy with doubts, with fears—his letter had been intercepted; or, if Eliza had received it, her answer had been diverted. Perhaps she had at last realized that he was unfit for her love. The impulse almost mastered him to go once more to Hydrangea House, but pride prevented; his unhappiness hardened, grew bitter, suspicious. Then he again read her letter, and its patent sincerity swept away all doubt; Eliza was unwavering; if not now he would find her at the end of two years, unchanged, warm, beautiful.

He was summoned to dinner, where he found the delicacies he especially liked. The plates were liberally filled, all made a pretence at eating, but, at the end, the food remained hardly touched. The forced conversation fell into sudden, disturbing silences. His father sharpened the carving knife twice, which, for shad roe, was scarcely necessary; his mother scolded the servant without cause; even Ellie was affected, and smiled at him with a bright tenderness.

He was to leave Ellerton at midnight, when he would be enabled to connect with a western express, and it was arranged for him to spend a last hour at the Club with his father. Ellie and the servant stood upon the pavement, his mother was upstairs in the sewing room... where he entered softly.

At the Club the billiard room was dark, the tables shrouded, but from a room at the end of the hall came the murmur of the nightly coon-can players. They seated themselves at a table, and his father ordered beer and cigars. It was the first time that he had acknowledged Anthony to possess the discretion of maturity, and he raised the stein to his lips with the feeling that it was a sacrament of his manhood, an earnest and pledge of his success.

The midnight train emerged from the gloom of the station, passed through the outskirts of Ellerton, detached rows of dark dwellings, by the grounds of the Baseball Association, its fence still plastered with the gaudy circus posters, into the dim fields and shining streams. Anthony stood on the last, swinging platform, gazing back at the gloom that enveloped Ellerton, at the place where Hydrangea House was hid by the hills. An acute misery possessed him—the unsettled maimer of his departure from Eliza, her silence, struggled in his thoughts with the attempt to realize the necessity of the course he had adopted to bring about a final and lasting joy. He wondered if Eliza would understand the need for his going; but, assured of her wise sympathy, he felt that she would; and a measure of content settled upon him. The engine swung about a curve, disappearing into the obscurity of a wood. “Eliza,” he cried aloud, “Eliza, be here when I come back to you!”

He sat for the greater part of an hour on the deserted platform of the junction, where signal lamps glistened on the steel rails that vanished into the night, into the west, the inscrutable future. The headlight of the massive locomotive flared unexpectedly, whitely upon him; the engine, with a brief glimpse of a sanguinary heart of fire illuminating a sooty human countenance, gleaming, liquid eyeballs, passed and stopped; and Anthony hastily mounted the train. He made his way through the narrow passage of buttoned, red curtains, and found his berth, when he sank into a weary, dreamless sleep.