e than once sitting with a
letter before him and gazing at it for many minutes together. She had
also noted that it was the same letter on each occasion; that it was a
closed letter, and also that it was unstamped. She knew that, because
she had seen it in his desk--the desk once belonging to her father, a
sloping thing with a green-baize top. Sometimes he kept it locked, but
very often he did not; and more than once, when he had asked her to get
him something from the desk, not out of meanness, but chiefly because
her moral standard had not a multitude of delicate punctilios, she
had examined the envelope curiously. The envelope bore a woman's
handwriting, and the name on it was not that of the man who owned the
coat--and the letter. The name on the envelope was Shiel Crozier, but
the name of the man who owned the coat was J. G. Kerry--James Gathorne
Kerry, so he said.

Kitty Tynan had certainly enough imagination to make her cherish a
mystery. She wondered greatly what it all meant. Never in anything else
had she been inquisitive or prying where the man was concerned; but
she felt that this letter had the heart of a story, and she had made up
fifty stories which she thought would fit the case of J. G. Kerry, who
for over four years had lived in her mother's house. He had become part
of her life, perhaps just because he was a man,--and what home is a
real home without a man?--perhaps because he always had a kind, quiet,
confidential word for her, or a word of stimulating cheerfulness;
indeed, he showed in his manner occasionally almost a boisterous
hilarity. He undoubtedly was what her mother called "a queer dick," but
also "a pippin with a perfect core," which was her way of saying that
he was a man to be trusted with herself and with her daughter; one who
would stand loyally by a friend or a woman. He had stood by them both
when Augustus Burlingame, the lawyer, who had boarded with them when
J. G. Kerry first came, coarsely exceeded the bounds of liberal
friendliness which marked the household, and by furtive attempts at
intimacy began to make life impossible for both mother and daughter.
Burlingame took it into his head, when he received notice that his rooms
were needed for another boarder, that J. G. Kerry was the cause of it.
Perhaps this was not without reason, since Kerry had seen Kitty Tynan
angrily unclasping Burlingame's arm from around her waist, and had used
cutting and decisive words to the sensualist aft