en exemplary--measles, and
mumps, and whooping-cough their only ailments.

During the month of Leah's confinement Barty's nocturnal literary
activity was unusually great. Night after night he wrote in his
sleep, and accumulated enough raw material to last him a lifetime;
for the older he grew and the more practised his hand the longer it
took him to give his work the shape he wished; he became more
fastidious year by year as he became less of an amateur.

One morning, a day or two before his wife's complete recovery, he
found a long personal letter from Martia by his bedside--a letter
that moved him very deeply, and gave him food for thought during
many weeks and months and years:

* * * * *

"My Beloved Barty,--The time has come at last when I must bid you
farewell.

"I have outstayed my proper welcome on earth as a disembodied
conscience by just a hundred years, and my desire for reincarnation
has become an imperious passion not to be resisted.

"It is more than a desire--it is a duty as well, a duty far too long
deferred.

"Barty, I am going to be your next child. I can conceive no greater
earthly felicity than to be a child of yours and Leah's. I should
have been one long before, but that you and I have had so much to do
together for this beautiful earth--a great debt to pay: you, for
being as you are; I, for having known you.

"Barty, you have no conception what you are to me and always have
been.

[Illustration: "'I DON'T THINK I EVER HEARD HIM MENTION YOUR NAME'"]

"I am to you but a name, a vague idea, a mysterious inspiration;
sometimes a questionable guide, I fear. You don't even believe all I
have told you about myself--you think it all a somnambulistic
invention of your own; and so does your wife, and so does your
friend.

"O that I could connect myself in your mind with the shape I wore
when I was last a living thing! No shape on earth, not either yours
or Leah's or that of any child yet born to you both, is more
beautiful to the eye that has learned how to see than the fashion of
that lost face and body of mine.

"_You_ wore the shape once, and so did your father and mother, for
you were Martians. Leah was a Martian, and wore it too; there are
many of them here--they are the best on earth, the very salt
thereof. I mean to be the best of them all,