clerk handed it over the counter to me, instead of the heavy envelope
I had hoped for, it was a thin slip of an affair that fluttered away
from my hand. It was so very slim and light that I feared to open it
there, lest it should be but a mocking envelope, nothing more.

So I hastened back to my cab, and, ordering the man to drive to the
law-offices, tore it open as I jumped in. It enclosed simply a printed
slip, cut from some New York paper--a list of the Algeria's
passengers.

"What joke is this?" I said as I scanned it more closely.

By some spite of fortune my name was printed directly after the
Meyrick party. Was it for this, this paltry thing, that Bessie has
denied me a word? I turned over the envelope, turned it inside
out--not a penciled word even!

The shadow that I had seen on that good-bye visit to Philadelphia was
clear to me now. I had said at Lenox, repeating the words after Bessie
with fatal emphasis, "I am glad, very glad, that Fanny Meyrick is to
sail in October. I would not have her stay on this side for worlds!"
Then the next day, twenty-four hours after, I told her that I too was
going abroad. Coward that I was, not to tell her at first! She might
have been sorry, vexed, but not _suspicious_.

Yes, that was the ugly word I had to admit, and to admit that I had
given it room to grow.

My first hesitancy about taking her with me, my transfer from the
Russia to the later steamer, and, to crown all, that leaf from Fanny's