e story. I am sorry for that poor girl, but if you only
let her know that he really loves her she will not mind all the rest
so very much; she will be able to bear the pain of even life-long
separation if she only knows."

Miss Sylvia picked up her knitting and went away. As for me, I thought
savagely of the dead man she loved and called him a cad, or at best, a
fool.

Next day Miss Sylvia was her serene, smiling self once more, and she
did not again make any reference to what she had told me. A fortnight
later she returned home and I went my way back to the world. During
the following winter I wrote several letters to Miss Sylvia and
received replies from her. Her letters were very like herself. When I
sent her the third-rate magazine containing my story--nothing but a
third-rate magazine would take it in its rewritten form--she wrote to
say that she was so glad that I had let the poor girl know.

Early in April I received a letter from an aunt of mine in the
country, saying that she intended to sell her place and come to the
city to live. She asked me to go out to Sweetwater for a few weeks and
assist her in the business of settling up the estate and disposing of
such things as she did not wish to take with her.

When I arrived at Sweetwater I found it moist and chill with the sunny
moisture and teasing chill of our Canadian springs. They are long and
fickle and reluctant, these springs of ours, but, oh, the unnamable
charm of them! There was something even in the red buds of the maples
at Sweetwater and in the long, smoking stretches of hillside fields
that sent a thrill through my veins, finer and subtler than any given
by old wine.

A week after my arrival, when we had got the larger affairs pretty
well straightened out, Aunt Mary suggested that I had better overhaul
Uncle Alan's room.

"The things there have never been meddled with since he died," she
said. "In particular, there's an old trunk full of his letters and his
papers. It was brought home from California after his death. I've
never examined them. I don't suppose there is anything of any
importance among them. But I'm not going to carry all that old rubbish
to town. So I wish you would look over them and see if there is
anything that should be kept. The rest may be burned."

I felt no particular interest in the task. My Uncle Alan Blair was a
mere name to me. He was my mother's eldest brother and had died years
before I was born. I had heard that