But Hannah's hint had no further effect upon the redoubtable Harry. Two days later he appeared, smiling, congratulatory, deploring the fact that she would be lost in a certain sense to his friendship, although he hoped always to be looked upon as a little more than a friend.
Hannah covered her mortification under a calm and condescending exterior. She blushed appropriately, said some sentimental things about hoping their friendship would not be affected by the change, told him how much she had enjoyed their correspondence, but gave him to understand that it had been mere friendship of course from her point of view, and Harry indulgently allowed her to think that he had hoped for more and was grieved but consolable over the outcome.
They waxed a trifle sentimental at the parting, but when Harry was gone, Hannah wrote a most touching letter to Lemuel Skinner which raised him to the seventh heaven of delight, causing him to feel that he was treading upon air as he walked the prosaic streets of his native town where he had been going about during Hannah's absence like a lost spirit without a guiding star.
"DEAR LEMUEL:" she wrote:-"I am coming home. I wonder if you will be glad?
(Artful Hannah, as if she did not know!) "It is very delightful in New York and I have been having a gay time since I came, and everybody has been most pleasant, but-"'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, Still, be it ever so humble, there's no place like home. A charm from the skies seems to hallow it there, Which, go through the world, you'll not meet with elsewhere. Home, home, sweet home! There's no place like home.
"That is a new song, Lemuel, that everybody here is singing. It is written by a young American named John Howard Payne who is in London now acting in a great playhouse. Everybody is wild over this song. I'll sing it for you when I come home.
"I shall be at home in time for singing school next week, Lemuel. I wonder if you'll come to see me at once and welcome me. You cannot think how glad I shall be to get home again. It seems as though I had been gone a year at least. Hoping to see you soon, I remain "Always your sincere friend, "HANNAH HEATH."
And thus did Hannah make smooth her path before her, and very soon after inditing this epistle she bade good-bye to New York and took her way home resolved to waste no further time in chasing will-o-the-wisps.