with that.

"I've been writing most of the day. It's evening now, and I'm tired. I
was going to tell more. Tell you of things that happened afterward--tell
you why you found me where you did find me. But now I don't believe I
want to tell those things. They're too awful. They'd hurt you--haunt you.
And that's not what I want to do. What I want is to make you understand,
and if the part I've told hasn't done that--

"'I think it was to save Ann you were going to give up Verna,' you said.
Oh Katie--how did you know? How _do_ you know?

"And then you called to me. You weren't sick at all--were you, Katie? Oh
I soon guessed that it was the wonderful goodness of your heart--not the
disease of it--caused that 'attack.'

"Then those beautiful days began. I wanted to talk about what those days
meant--what you meant--what our play--our dream meant. Things I thought
that I never said--how proud I was you should want to make up those
stories about me--how I wanted to _be_ the things you said I was--and oh,
Katie dear, the trouble you got me into by loving to tell those
stories--telling one to one man and another to another! I'd never known
any one full of _play_ like you--yet play that is so much more than just
play. Sometimes a picture of Centralia would come to me when I'd hear you
telling about my having lived in Florence. Sometimes when I was listening
to stories of things you and I had done in Italy I'd see that old place
where I used to put suspenders in boxes--! Katie, how strange it all was.
How did it happen that things you made up were things I had dreamed about
without really knowing what I was dreaming? How wonderful you were,
Katie--how good--to put me in the things of my dreams rather than the
things of my life. The world doesn't do that for us.

"It seems a ridiculous thing to be mentioning, when I owe you so many
things too wonderful to mention--but you know I do owe you some money. I
took what was in my purse. I hope I can pay it back. I'm so tired just
now it doesn't seem to me I ever can--but if I don't, don't associate it
with my not paying back the missionary money!

"Katie, do you know how I'd like to pay you back? I'd like to give you
the most beautiful things I've ever dreamed. And I hope that some of
them, at least, are waiting somewhere--and not very far off--for you. How
I used to love to hear you laugh--watch you play your tricks on
people--so funny and so dear--

"Now that's over. Katie, I don'