'You said you had something to say to me about that,' said Helen, recalling him to the conversation; 'you seem to have fallen into a reverie.'
'It was but a temporary one, dearest, and is immediately dispelled by the sound of your voice,' said Alston Griswold, rousing himself. 'We were talking about your letters to me, and what I want to say to you is this, that you must write every day.'
'Every day!' cried Helen, in astonishment. 'There is not a mail every day, Alston; you would receive several by the same post, and find quite a jumble of news.'
'Nevertheless, you must write every day,' he said with a smile, 'though what you write need not be posted; and as to letters, I do not intend you to send me letters at all; I intend you to keep a diary.'
'A diary!' she echoed; 'I never did such a thing in my life. I have begun a dozen, kept them up bravely for the first day or two, forgotten them for a week, and then descended into a series of entries "nothing particular."'
Griswold laughed. 'That was because you had other things to engross your mind; now I hope your diary will be your one absorbing topic. It will be the sole record I shall ever see of your daily life, which, though absent, I hope and know I shall in a certain sense fill, and it therefore must be all-interesting and all-important to me.'
'You have thoroughly studied my weak points, Alston,' said Helen, with a smile, 'and know that that is an argument that I cannot withstand--the journal shall be kept.'
'Kept from day to day, copiously and full of detail,' said her husband; 'do not omit anything because you may think it trivial or uninteresting; the trivialities are probably what will interest me most. Let me be able to follow your life from day to day through all the familiar hours of it, and thus endeavour to cheat myself out of the sense of separation.'
As he spoke these last words, he bent down, and encircling her with his arms, pressed her to his heart. 'Now let us go and see the child,' he said--'my little unconscious rival. If she had not existed, you would have accompanied me on this trip to the old country, and I consider myself exceedingly generous in still retaining my affection for her.'
The Cuba was advertised to sail at three P.M., but early the next morning the house in Fifth-avenue was astir, and with all the bustle and confusion occasioned by its master's impending departure. Huge boxes, packages of coats and rugs and piles of clothing, removed from drawers and submitted to inspection before being packed, lumbered up the passage; heterogeneous articles, from paper parcels up to portmanteaus, were continually arriving, their bearers bringing with them little notes, the writers of which expressed their hope that they were not giving their friend too much trouble in asking him 'just to take this across with him;' friends who lived in the neighbourhood, and did not care to take the trouble of going down to the ship, dropped in to say good-bye, and were found wandering all over the house in search of its owner.