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LOVE IN DIFFICULTIES.
"It means that I am a ruined man, my poor girl!" "Ruined! O father, how can that be?
Methought you were a man of much substance.

Mother always said so." Gertrude looked anxiously into the careworn face of her father, which had greatly changed during the past weeks.

He paid her occasional visits in her self-chosen home, being one of those who had ceased to fear contagion, and went about almost without precaution, from sheer indifference to the long-continued peril.

He had been a changed man ever since the melancholy deaths of his son and his wife; but today a darker cloud than any she had seen there before rested upon his brow, and the daughter was anxious to learn the reason of it.