What am I writing? I dare not read it. How confident I feel, how transported with the thought that you may in remembering me forget my much-repented dictum, or at least relegate it to the Quixotic realm to which it belongs.
As I near the close of my letter, I am possessed with a new fear. Shall I dare send it? What if you shall have discovered new powers in yourself, new persons out in the broad world, which shall make you glad of your escape? It is so long since I have heard of you, and life is so full of new things, I forget that you too have quite the right to change your mind. If this be your condition, do not, I beg of you, write me. I could not bear the humiliation as your great heart bore yours. Consign my letter, then, to the great silence, and only remember me as ever and always your sincere friend,
Ellen.
What was his colossal fortune to David Morning now? Out of the past came this message of life and love; of a love gone forever, and a life which now seemed barren of purpose and hope.
What is time but a name? The intervening years shriveled into nothingness, and he was again bathing in the light which shone from the eyes of the woman he loved, the one woman on earth or in heaven for him, yesterday and to-day and forever. Again he walked with her under the whispering foliage along the brow of the hill which crowns the Queen City of the plains, and watched the burning sunsets illumine the lavender mountains and change the clouds into embers of glory. Again he sat beside her, reading some tender or beautiful or stirring passage from poet or essayist. Again, at the good-night going, he felt her dainty kiss, thrilling his soul to ecstasy.
And she was lost to him now, lost through his pride, lost through his vanity, lost through such dense and inexcusable stupidity as never before possessed or afflicted a man. He had taken her girlish doubts as final. He had thought to exhibit his manly pride—which was, after all, only conceit of self—as an offset to her presuming to question the possibility of her being possessed by a great love for him. Coward that he was to surrender this glorious creature without an effort. Dolt that he was to so mistake her maidenly hesitancy.
And she—dear heart—had loved him after all. She had condescended to summon him, and he had never received the message. What had she thought of his failure to respond? What must she have thought of him, save that he was a cruel, conceited creature unworthy of her love? What humiliation his unexplained silence must for a time have brought to her gentle spirit! What wreck and misery had not this miscarriage of her missive brought to his life!
If he could have identified the clerk or postman whose carelessness had misplaced her letter, he would have beaten him in his fury, and he wished for an ax that he might hew and batter to splinters the inanimate desk whose machinery had been instrumental in wrecking two lives.
Were they hopelessly wrecked? He caught his breath at the thought. He at least was free, and whatever else might come never would he be otherwise. Never should wile of woman enchant him, never should desire for home and love and perpetuation of race and name beguile him. He would walk lonely to the gates of the eternal morning, and wait for her beyond the portal, and carry her soul upon the pinions of his immortal love to the uttermost confines of ether, where no entrapments or environments of earth could follow or molest them, and in the glow of the astral light he would claim her as his own, and give himself to her forever and ever.
Ellen’s letter released the passion which had been locked for ten years in the silent chambers of David Morning’s soul, and it possessed the man, and mastered him with throes of bitter agony and throbs of ecstatic delight. His cheeks were wet with the tears of disappointment, and again to the very center of him he laughed with joy as he covered the letter with kisses.