“’Tis midnight, my darling—the house is so lonely.”

“If it is not midnight, it might almost be, it is so dismal,” soliloquized Thea, with a sigh, as she jotted down the first line and proceeded:

“All, all are asleep but me.

I waken to weep—”

“That is not very accurate, as I have not been asleep yet, but it is poetical license,” murmured Thea, as she scribbled some more words:

—“Ah, beloved, if only,

If only I were with thee!”

The tears rushed to the blue eyes, and a smothered sob came from her throat, so passionately real was her aspiration. A moment’s pause, and the little pencil went on:

“But the swift hours are bearing thee further away,

The swift hours whose flight my poor heart can not stay!