not have seen Mr. Clarence Van Tramp slip under his vest. Elkhart saw the inconsistency, and paused in what he was about to say.
"Yes, yes; thank you: I know," Miss Jones ran on; "but I will send for it in the morning. I can send a note to ask if he took it by mistake, or mamma can, if that will be more proper. He would never return it to you, I am almost sure."
"No?" said Elkhart.
"No; and how cross you are! Why you can have another handkerchief just like it to keep as long as he keeps that. Come in, please, or promise me to remain there, and I will fetch you one."
"No," our hero said a second time, perhaps a little scornfully, but with wonderful coolness, the number of emotions by which his mind had been agitated during this short debate, being considered, "Mr. Van Trump has nothing to fear under your protection," he added, and held out his hand. "Good night; good bye!" poor Thomas Elkhart ended by saying, somewhat less steadily, and walked away from the woman he loved, with a resolution never to see her more. "If she ever loved me, as I once thought, she certainly does not now, and my presence encumbers her. I know. I am not worthy of her. Who is? I will at least be in Italy before the sacrifice is complete, and may never hear that she is the unhappy wife of this man," were the meditations which went with our hero to his pillow that night. They had been less orderly upon his first arrival home, two hours earlier, or those bitter tears, which had forced themselves between the fingers of the hands in which his face was so long buried upon the bed-side, would not have been to chronicle. Afterward he dreamed that he was engaged upon a colossal statue of some great personage; and when it was done, lo! there stood the exact resemblance of Mr. Clarence Van Trump, in marble, oven to his favorite short cutaway coat and light fancy trousers. But when, in a fit of ungovernable rage, he had seized a mighty sledge to demolish the figure, which was, oddly enough, grinning at him, and stroking a finely-chiselled mustache, on a sudden the likeness of sweet Mary Jones, as he had carved her, occupied the pedestal instead; then the hammer, checked in mid career, alighted on his own head, and he awoke to find it broad day, and his temples throbbing as fiercely as
