if to conceal their number from herself. The counting of these bottles
was a labor, but it is not even by them that the roup is remembered.
Among them some sacrilegious hands found a bundle of papers with a sad
blue ribbon round them. They were the Painted Lady's love-letters, the
letters she had written to the man. Why or how they had come back to her
no one knew.

Most of them were given to Grizel, but a dozen or more passed without
her leave into the kists of various people, where often since then they
have been consulted by swains in need of a pretty phrase; and Tommy's
school-fellows, the very boys and girls who hooted the Painted Lady,
were in time--so oddly do things turn out--to be among those whom her
letters taught how to woo. Where the kists did not let in the damp or
careless fingers, the paper long remained clean, the ink but little
faded. Some of the letters were creased, as if they had once been much
folded, perhaps for slipping into secret hiding-places, but none of them
bore any address or a date. "To my beloved," was sometimes written on
the cover, and inside he was darling or beloved again. So no one could
have arranged them in the order in which they were written, though there
was a three-cornered one which said it was the first. There was a violet
in it, clinging to the paper as if they were fond of each other, and
Grizel's mamma had written, "The violet is me, hiding in a corner
because I am so happy." The letters were in many moods, playful,
reflective, sad, despairing, arch, but all were written in an ecstasy of
the purest love, and most of them were cheerful, so that you seemed to
see the sun dancing on the paper while she wrote, the same sun that
afterwards showed up her painted cheeks. Why they came back to her no
one ever discovered, any more than how she who slipped the violet into
that three-cornered one and took it out to kiss again and wrote, "It is
my first love-letter, and I love it so much I am reluctant to let it
go," became in a few years the derision of the Double Dykes. Some of
these letters may be in old kists still, but whether that is so or not,
they alone have passed the Painted Lady's memory from one generation to
another, and they have purified it, so that what she was died with her
vile body, and what she might have been lived on, as if it were her true
self.

CHAPTER XXXIV

WHO TOLD TOMMY TO SPEAK

"Miss Alison Cray presents her compliments to--and requests th