is pockets; and in
doing so, he found in an inside vest-pocket a long thin pocket-book
filled with hundred-dollar bills, and a dainty-looking letter. It was
addressed to Mr. Eugene Brassfield, was unstamped, and marked, "To be
Read En Route."

There was invitation, there was allurement, in the very superscription.
Clearly, it seemed, he ought to open and examine these letters. They
might serve to clear up this mystery. He would begin with this.

"My darling!" it began, without any other form of address--and was not
this enough, beloved?--

"My own darling! I write this so that you may have something of me,
which you can see and touch and kiss as you are borne farther and
farther from me. Distance unbridged is such a terrible thing--any long
distance; and more than our hands may reach and clasp across is
interstellar space to me. You said last night that all beauty, all
sweetness, all things delectable and enticing and fair, all things
which allure and enrapture, are so bound up in little me, that surely
the very giants of steam and steel would be drawn back to me, instead
of bearing you away. Ah, my Eugene! You wondered why I put my hands
behind me, and would not see your out-stretched arms! Now that you are
gone, and will not return for so long--until so near the day when I may
be all that I am capable of becoming to you, let me tell you--I was
afraid!

"Not of you, dearest, not of you--for with all your ardor of wooing
(and no girl ever had a more perfect lover--I shall always thank God
for that mixture of Lancelot and Sir Galahad in you which makes every
moment in your presence a delight), I always knew that you could leave
me like a sensible boy, and, while longing for me, stay away. But
I--whom you have sometimes complained of a little for my coldness--had
I not looked above your eyes, and put my hands behind me, I should have
clung to you, dear, I was afraid, and never have allowed you to go as
you are now going, and made you feel that I am not the perfect woman
that you describe to me, as me. Even now, I fear that this letter will
do me harm in your heart; but all the lover in me--and girls inherit
from their fathers as well as from their mothers--cries out in me to
woo you; and you must forget this, only at such times of tenderness as
you will sometimes have while you are gone, when one embrace would be
worth a world. Then read or remember this, as my return-clasp for such
thoughts.

"Beside