She drew up to her table, opened a small portable writing-desk, and rapidly wrote these words:
“Mr. W——:—Esteemed and Valued Friend. The desire you express can never be gratified, because, while feeling your worth, knowing how good and truthful you are, I know in heart I cannot harbor the love which would be a just return for that which you feel and offer. It will make me very unhappy to think I sadden your bright life in any way. Try to forget love in the friendship I shall ever feel so proud and happy to possess.
“With sympathy and sincerity, I am your humble friend,
“Hattie Butler.”
She bowed her head and wept after she had sealed and directed her letter, for she felt sorrow in her soul that her answer must pain so warm a heart.
Then she knelt again in silent prayer, read, as she ever did, a chapter in the revealed word of God, and then lay down to the rest which innocence alone can enjoy—that quiet, dreamless rest which gives new life to the body and the soul.
And thus we will leave her, while for a time and for a reason we fly far away on the swift wings of fancy to a different—a far different scene.
CHAPTER XXIV.
SCENE IN THE YOSEMITE.
Not in all California—not even in the grandly glorious valley among the cliffs and gorges of the famed Yosemite, can be found a wilder scene than that exhibited where the Feather River breaks in furious haste through an awful chasm in the Sierra Nevada. A friend, a dear friend, who mined there for years, has described it over and over, and talked to me about it till I can hear the eternal roar of the white waters, feel the very cliffs shake with the dizzy dash and whirl of its cataracts—look down on the eddies where gold, washed from the veins above which may never be reached by mortal hand, has been accumulating for centuries.
While our fair heroine was sleeping, taking the rest which nature needed, in a small log cabin on a little shelf of rock and ground just above where the Feather River broke in wild grandeur through the gorge, before a fire made from the limbs of trees cast on shore by the torrent in a whirling eddy just below, a young man sat, with a weary look on his fine, intellectual face, looking into the fire.