ll itself. Across the park there are dead boughs
cracking down under the weight of snow; and it would be very like you to
tramp over just because the roads will be so impossible.

I heard yesterday a thing which made me just a little more free and easy
in mind, though I had nothing sensibly on my conscience. Such a good youth
who two years ago believed I was his only possible future happiness, is
now quite happy with a totally different sort of person. I had a little
letter from him, shy and stately, announcing the event. I thought it such
a friendly act, for some have never the grace to unsay their grievances,
however much actually blessed as a consequence of them.

With that off my mind I can come to you swearing that there have been no
accidents on anybody's line of life through a mistake in signals, or a
flying in the face of them, where I have had any responsibility. As for
you, and as you know well by now, my signals were ready and waiting
before you sought for them. "Oh, whistle, and I'll come to you!" was
their giveaway attitude.

I am going down to play snowballs with Benjy. Good-by. If you come you
will find this letter on the hall table, and me you will probably hear
barking behind the rhododendrons.--So much your most loving.

LETTER LIV.

Beloved: We have been having a great day of tidyings out, rummaging
through years and years of accumulations--things quite useless but which I
have not liked to throw away. My soul has been getting such dusty answers
to all sorts of doubtful inquiries as to where on earth this, that, and
the other lay hidden. And there were other things, the memory of which had
lain quite dead or slept, till under the light of day they sprouted hack
into life like corn from the grave of an Egyptian mummy.

Very deep in one box I found a stealthy little collection of secret
playthings which it used to be my fond belief that nobody knew of but
myself. It may have been Anna's graspingness, when four years of
seniority gave her double my age, or Arthur's genial instinct for
destructiveness, which drove me into such deep concealment of my dearest
idols. But, whether for those or more mystic reasons, I know I had dolls
which I nursed only in the strictest privacy and lavished my firmest
love upon. It was because of them that I bore the reproach of being but
a lukewarm mother of dolls and careless of their toilets; the truth
being that my motherly passion expended itself in secret on