"You will miss him," Mellen said, quietly.
"Oh," replied his wife, with a forced smile, "I must make up my mind to be lonely. I shall live through the coming dreary months as I best can."
"It's horrid of you to go, Grant!" cried Elsie.
"I know it, dear; but there is no use in fighting the unavoidable."
"Mind you write to me as often as you do to Bessie," she said. "If she gets one letter the most, I never will forgive either of you."
As she said this, the girl ran up to her brother, and stood leaning against his shoulder, with a playful caress, while he looked down at her with such entire love and trust in his face, that Elizabeth crept quietly away, and left them together.
The few days left to Mellen passed in a tumult of preparation. Sad doubts were at his heart, vague and so formless that he could not have expressed them in words, but painful as proven realities.
Elizabeth was greatly disturbed also; her fine color had almost entirely disappeared. She trembled at the slightest shock, and her very lips would turn white when she spoke of her husband's departure. She seemed stricken with a mortal terror of his going, yet made no effort to detain him. She, too, had presentiments of evil that shocked her whole system, and made her brightest smile something mournful to look upon.
But the husband and wife had little opportunity to observe or understand the feelings that tortured them both. Elsie's cries, and tears, and hysterical spasms, kept the whole household in commotion. She should never see her brother again—never, never. Elizabeth might not be good to her. Sisters-in-law and school-friends were different creatures; she had found that out already. If she could only have died with her mother!
These cries broke out vehemently on the night before Mellen's departure. The spoiled child would not allow her brother to spend one moment from her side. So all that night Elizabeth, pale, still, and bowed down by a terrible heart-ache, watched with her husband by the azure couch which Elsie preferred to her bed. It was a sad, mournful night to them both.