ifle dull. Dorothea Middleton is an angel
of hospitality, but an up-country station has its limits even for a
saint. To your mind I'm dead as Queen Anne, but to me you are quite
distractingly alive. Why do you send out photographs taken in such a
fashion that your eyes look straight into the eyes of any lonely fellow
who chances to sit smoking his pipe in a friend's bungalow if you don't
want trouble to follow?

"There's one photograph which smiles. You know it! the one in the white
frock. When I'm pleased to be witty, I look at those eyes, and they
laugh back. My other hearers may be dull and unappreciative, but those
eyes never fail. Katrine and I have shared many a joke together during
these last years.

"There's another photograph--the dark one! A white, little face looking
out of the shadow; pensive this time, but always with those
straight-glancing eyes. It's your own fault, Katrine! If you had been
`taken' like ordinary folk, gazing blankly into space, all this might
never have happened... The pensive portrait is even deadlier than the
glad. It looks sorry for me. When I'm turning out at night leaving
Will and Dorothea alone, it understands how I feel. Its eyes follow me
to the door.

"I haven't a photograph to send you; I wouldn't send one if I had.
What's the use of a portrait of a big skeleton of a fellow, brown as a
nigger, and at thirty-five looking a lot more like forty? Let that
slide; but within the walls of the skeleton lives a lonely fellow who
has no one left to send him letters from home, and who for the last
three years has enjoyed his mail vicariously through extracts read from
a young girl's letters.

"You write wonderful letters, Katrine! I don't know if they are the
sort a literary critic would approve, but they bring new life into our
camp. Dorothea is generous in reading aloud all that she may, and I
could stand a pretty stiff examination upon your life in that delightful
little Cranford of a place, which you don't appreciate as you ought.
Those letters, plus the photograph, have done the damage.

"So this is what it comes to,--I want some letters for myself! I want
(it sounds appallingly conceited; never mind! Let it go at that), I
want you to know _me_, to realise my existence, even as I do yours.
Will you write to me sometimes? I give you fair notice that in any case
I mean to write to you. It can do you no harm to read my effusions, and
if you do violence to your