a brief line, positively
requesting her to write. There was no answer by the return post, but the
day after a letter in a neat feminine hand, and bearing the Melchester
post-mark, was handed to him by the stationer.

The fact alone of its arrival was sufficient to satisfy his imaginative
sentiment. He was not anxious to open the epistle, and in truth did not
begin to read it for nearly half-an-hour, anticipating readily its terms
of passionate retrospect and tender adjuration. When at last he turned
his feet to the fireplace and unfolded the sheet, he was surprised and
pleased to find that neither extravagance nor vulgarity was there. It
was the most charming little missive he had ever received from woman. To
be sure the language was simple and the ideas were slight; but it was so
self-possessed; so purely that of a young girl who felt her womanhood to
be enough for her dignity that he read it through twice. Four sides were
filled, and a few lines written across, after the fashion of former days;
the paper, too, was common, and not of the latest shade and surface. But
what of those things? He had received letters from women who were fairly
called ladies, but never so sensible, so human a letter as this. He
could not single out any one sentence and say it was at all remarkable or
clever; the _ensemble_ of the letter it was which won him; and beyond the
one request that he would write or come to her again soon there was
nothing to show her sense of a claim upon him.

To write again and develop a correspondence was the last thing Raye would
have preconceived as his conduct in such a situation; yet he did send a
short, encouraging line or two, signed with his pseudonym, in which he
asked for another letter, and cheeringly promised that he would try to
see her again on some near day, and would never forget how much they had
been to each other during their short acquaintance.

CHAPTER IV

To return now to the moment at which Anna, at Melchester, had received
Raye's letter.

It had been put into her own hand by the postman on his morning rounds.
She flushed down to her neck on receipt of it, and turned it over and
over. 'It is mine?' she said.

'Why, yes, can't you see it is?' said the postman, smiling as he guessed
the nature of the document and the cause of the confusion.

'O yes, of course!' replied Anna, looking at the letter, forcedly
tittering, and blushing still more.

Her look of embarrassment