st know what is in this letter to me."

With trembling fingers I broke the seal and drew out the closely
written pages which the envelope contained.

"Mother's Only Comfort," the letter began, and at the sight of the
dear familiar words, which I had so often heard from my mother's
lips--it was the name she had given me when a tiny girl, and which she
used until the day of her death--tears again blinded my eyes.

"When you read this I shall have left you forever. It is my prayer
that when the time comes for you to read it, it will be because you
have forgiven your father, not because you are in desperate need. How
I wish I could have seen you safe in the shelter of a good man's love
before I had to go away from you forever!"

"Safe in the shelter of a good man's love," I repeated the words
thoughtfully. Had my mother been given her wish when she could no
longer witness its fulfilment? I was angry and humiliated at myself
that I could not give a swift, unqualified assent to my own question.
A "good man" Dicky certainly was, and I was in the "shelter of his
love" at present. But "safe" with Dicky I was afraid I could never
be. Mingled always with my love for him, my trust in him, was a
tiny undercurrent of uncertainty as to the stability of my husband's
affection for me.

As I turned to my mother's letter again, there was a tiny pang at my
heart at the thought that by my marriage with Dicky I had thwarted the
dearest wish of my little mother's heart.

For between the lines I could read the unspoken thought that had been
in her mind since I was a very young girl. "Safe in the shelter of a
good man's love" meant to my mother only one thing. If she had written
the words "safe in the shelter of Jack Bickett's love," I could not
have grasped her meaning more clearly.

But my mother's wish must forever remain ungranted. Jack was
"somewhere in France," and for me, safe or not safe, stable or
unstable, Dicky was "my man," the only man I had ever loved, the only
man I could ever love. "For better or worse," the dear old minister
had said who performed our wedding ceremony, and my heart reaffirmed
the words as I bent my eyes again to the closely written pages I held
in my hands.

"Because you have always been so bitter, Margaret, against your
father, and because it has always caused me great anguish to speak of
him, I have allowed you to rest under the impression that I had never
heard anything concerning