Sam was about to joke him about the uncertainties of love, when his eye rested on his drawn face.
“Lord no, Charlie,” he protested, “you know I wouldn’t treat you like that.”
“Then look again, you may have dropped it.”
Sam turned and looked carefully over the floor, over and under his desks and tables and returned.
“No, but it may have been thrown into the wrong bag by that fool mail clerk on the train. You may get it to-morrow.”
He turned away and walked to his office, forgetting his key in the open box. The vague sense of calamity that weighed on his heart for the past two days, now became a reality.
He sat in his office all the afternoon in a dull stupor of suspense. He tried to read her last letter over. But the pages would get blurred and fade out of sight, and he would wake to find he had been staring at one sentence for an hour.
He knew his foster mother would be all sympathy and tenderness if he told her, but somehow he hadn’t the heart. She had led him to his love. He had been so boyishly and frankly happy boasting to her of his success, he sickened at the thought of telling her. He went out for a walk in the woods, and lay down alone beside a brook like a wounded animal.
The next day he watched his box again with the hope that Sam’s guess might be right, and the missing letter would come. But, instead of the big square-cut envelope he had waited for, he received a bulky letter in an old-fashioned masculine handwriting with the post mark of Independence, and a mill mark in the upper left hand corner.
He did not have to look twice at that letter. It was the sealed verdict of his jury. He locked his office door. It was long and rambling, full of a kindly sympathy expressed in a restrained manner. He could not believe at first that so outspoken a man as the General could have written it. The substance of its meaning, however, was plain enough. He meant to say that as he was not in a position to make a suitable home at present for a wife, and as he disapproved of long engagements, it seemed better that no engagement should be entered into or announced.