ention of Sweetwater on his side of the wall, but it struck the ear
of Brotherson also. With an ejaculation as bitter as it was impatient,
he roused himself and gathered up the letters. Sweetwater could hear
the successive rustlings as he bundled them up in his hand. Then came
another silence--then the lifting of a stove lid.

Sweetwater had not been wrong in his secret apprehension. His
identification with his unimpressionable neighbour's mood had shown him
what to expect. These letters--these innocent and precious outpourings
of a rare and womanly soul--the only conceivable open sesame to the
hard-locked nature he found himself pitted against, would soon be
resolved into a vanishing puff of smoke.

But the lid was thrust back, and the letters remained in hand. Mortal
strength has its limits. Even Brotherson could not shut down that lid
on words which might have been meant for him, harshly as he had repelled
the idea.

The pause which followed told little; but when Sweetwater heard the man
within move with characteristic energy to the door, turn the key and
step back again to his place at the table, he knew that the danger
moment had passed and that those letters were about to be read, not
casually, but seriously, as indeed their contents merited.

This caused Sweetwater to feel serious himself. Upon what result might
he calculate? What would happen to this hardy soul, when the fact he
so scornfully repudiated, was borne in upon him, and he saw that the
disdain which had antagonised him was a mere device--a cloak to hide the
secret heart of love and eager womanly devotion? Her death--little as
Brotherson would believe it up till now--had been his personal loss
the greatest which can befall a man. When he came to see this--when the
modest fervour of her unusual nature began to dawn upon him in these
self-revelations, would the result be remorse, or just the deadening
and final extinction of whatever tenderness he may have retained for her
memory?

Impossible to tell. The balance of probability hung even. Sweetwater
recognised this, and clung, breathless, to his loop-hole. Fain would he
have seen, as well as heard.

Mr. Brotherson read the first letter, standing. As it soon became public
property, I will give it here, just as it afterwards appeared in the
columns of the greedy journals:

"Beloved:

"When I sit, as I often do, in perfect quiet under the stars,
and dream that you are looking at them too, no