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424 Loves of A. Fitz Clarence and Rosa Ethelton
"Alonzo, dear, I have been wrong. You could not have said so cruel a thing. It must have been some one who imitated your voice in malice or in jest."
The Reverend coldy answered, in Alonzo's tones:
" You have said all was over between us. So let it be. I spurn your proffered repentance, and despise it!"
Then he departed, radiant with fiendish triumph, to return no more with his imaginary telephonic invention forever.
Four hours afterward, Alonzo arrived with his mother from her favorite haunts of poverty and vice. They summoned the San Francisco household ; but there was no reply. They waited, and continued to wait, upon the voiceless telephone.
At length, when it was sunset in San Francisco, and three hours and a half after dark in Eastport, an answer came to the oft-repeated cry of " Rosannah!"
But, alas, it was Aunt Susan's voice that spake. She said:
"1 have been out all day; just got in. I will go and find her."
The watchers waited two minutes — five minutes — ten minutes. Then came these fatal words, in a frightened tone:
" She is gone, and her baggage with her. To visit another friend, she told the servants. But I found this note on the table in her room. Listen: ' I am gone; seek not to trace me out; my heart is broken; you will never see me more. Tell him I shall always think of him when I sing my poor " Sweet By-and-by," but never of the unkind words he said about it.' That is her note. Alonzo, Alonzo, what does it mean? What has happened?"
But Alonzo sat white and cold as the dead. His mother threw back the velvet curtains and opened a |
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