All this and much more! Some of it he had wanted to say
to her in San Francisco at times when they had met, but he could not
find the words. But she had given him the courage to go on and do the
only thing he was fit for, and he had resolved to stick to that, and
perhaps do something once more that might make him hear again her voice
as he had heard it that day, and again see the light that had shone in
her eyes as she sat there and read. And this was why he was sending her
a manuscript. She might have forgotten that she had told him a strange
story of her cousin who had disappeared--which she thought he might
at some time work up. Here it was. Perhaps she might not recognize it
again, in the way he had written it here; perhaps she did not really
mean it when she had given him permission to use it, but he remembered
her truthful eyes and believed her--and in any event it was hers to do
with what she liked. It had been a great pleasure for him to write it
and think that she would see it; it was like seeing her himself--that
was in HIS BETTER SELF--more worthy the companionship of a beautiful and
noble woman than the poor young man she would have helped. This was why
he had not called the week before she went away. But for all that, she
had made his life less lonely, and he should be ever grateful to her. He
could never forget how she unconsciously sympathized with him that day
over the loss that had blighted his life forever,--yet even then he did
not know that she, herself, had passed through the same suffering. But
just here the stricken widow of thirty, after a vain attempt to keep up
the knitted gravity of her eyebrows, bowed her dimpling face over
the letter of the blighted widower of twenty, and laughed so long and
silently that the tears stood out like dew on her light-brown eyelashes.

But she became presently severe again, and finished her reading of the
letter gravely. Then she folded it carefully, deposited it in a box on
her table, which she locked. After a few minutes, however, she unlocked
the box again and transferred the letter to her pocket. The serenity
of her features did not relax again, although her previous pretty
prepossession of youthful spirit was still indicated in her movements.
Going into her bedroom, she reappeared in a few minutes with a light
cloak thrown over her shoulders and a white-trimmed broad-brimmed hat.
Then she rolled up the manuscript in a paper, and called her French
maid. As she