tters
there was a faded photograph of her parents in earliest matrimony and
another photograph of someone she did not recognize--a man with a heavy
mustache and by the look of his clothes prosperous.

"Wonder who he was," Jenny speculated. "Perhaps that man who was struck
on her and who she wouldn't go away with." This photograph she burned.
Suddenly, at the bottom of the packet of letters, Jenny caught sight of
a familiar handwriting which made her heart beat with the shock of
unexpected discovery.

"However on earth did that come there?" she murmured as she read the
following old letter from Maurice.

422 G. R.

Friday.

My little darling thing,

I've got to go away this week-end, but never mind, I shall see you
on Tuesday, or anyway Wednesday for certain. I'll let you know at
the theater. Good night, my sweet one. You know I'm horribly
disappointed after all our jolly plans. But never mind, my dearest,
next week it will be just as delightful. 422 kisses from Maurice.

The passion which had once made such sentences seem written with fire
had long been dead. So far as the author was concerned, this old letter
had no power to move with elation or dejection. No vestige even of
fondness or sentiment clung to this memorial of anticipated joy. But why
was it hidden so carefully in her mother's desk, and why was it crumpled
by frequent reading? And how could it have arrived there in the
beginning? It was written in February after Jenny had left home. She
must have dropped it on one of her visits, and her mother finding it
must have thought there was something behind those few gay words. Jenny
tried to remember if she had roused the suspicion of an intrigue by
staying for a week-end with some girl friend. But, of course, she was
away all the time, and often her mother must have thought she was
staying with Maurice. All her scruples, all her care had gone for
nothing. She had wrecked her love to no purpose, for her mother must
have been weighed down by the imagination of her daughter's frailty. She
must have brooded over it, fed her heart with the bitterness of
disappointment and, ever since that final protest which made Jenny leave
home, in gnawing silence. Jenny flung the letter into the fire and sat
down to contemplate the dreadful fact that she had driven her mother
slowly mad. These doctors with their abscess were all wrong. It was
despair of her daughter's behavior which h