"He never saw his friend after that day. The next morning came an answer
from the young lady--a cruel and cold rejection of him--repudiation of
his love, and a doubt of his honor. It bewildered him, and, for a time,
crushed him. Long afterward, he found out that she had never seen the
letter he wrote, but a very different one, of his friend's concoction.
"Very soon afterward, they were gone--all three! and, before a year was
passed, he heard that his friend and the daughter were married, and the
father died of a fever contracted in Spain.
"He tried to go on as usual for several months, but it was no use. At
last, he left his practice, and all his connections, and wandered over
the United States--through towns and wildernesses. He rode across the
plains on a mustang; clambered through the gorges of the Rocky
Mountains; saw the tide come in through the Golden Gate at San
Francisco. He pushed north as far as Canada, and thence came down the
Mississippi to New Orleans. From there he crossed to the Pacific coast
again, and lived to find himself a second time in San Francisco. He
didn't stay there long, but struck overland, slanting southward, and, in
four or five months, appeared at Charleston, South Carolina. So he
worked up the Atlantic coast to New York. By the time he got there, he
was older and wiser, and strengthened, body and mind, by a rough
experience. He resolved to travel no more; but, as yet, it was not in
his power to feel happy.
"Much had happened in his absence. His friend, after living three or
four years with his wife in Europe, was separated from her--not,
however, by a regular divorce--and she had disappeared, and had not
since been heard of. It was reported that she was dead. She had left
with her husband a son, two or three years old, at that time a sickly
little fellow, scarcely expected to live. It was supposed that the
mother had discovered that it was her money, and not herself, that her
husband cared for, and, perhaps, too, may have imagined him to be still
thinking of his first love, who, indeed, was said to have in some way
fomented the quarrel between them, though how, or to what end, was never
known. She, by-the-way, after an absence of some years from New York,
suddenly reappeared there, and married a wealthy old Knickerbocker, who
died not long afterward, and left her his property. She became eminent
in society, and was intimate with all the most distinguished people. Her
former lover returned from Europe, with his little son, and, I believe,
settled somewhere in the neighborhood of New York. They met, and, I
understand, came to be on very friendly terms with one another, but the
conditions of their lives would have prevented the possibility of
marriage, even had they desired it.