body else!"

"If he wakes, I'll garotte him. 'Night."

"'Night."

VI

Oliver paused for a few minutes, waiting for the crash that would
proclaim that Ted had stumbled over something and waked Dickie beyond
redemption. But there was nothing but a soft gurgling of water from the
bathroom and then, after a while, a slight but definite addition to
the distant beehive noises of sleep in the house. He smiled, moved
cautiously into the dining room, sat down at the small sharp-cornered
desk where all the family correspondence was carried on and from which
at least one of the family a day received a grievous blow in the side
while attempting to get around it; lit the shaded light above it and sat
down to read his letter.

It was all Nancy, that letter, from the address, firm and straight as
any promise she ever gave, but graceful as the curl of a vine-stem,
gracile as her hands, with little unsuspected curlicues of humor and
fancy making the stiff "t's" bend and twisting the tails of the "e's,"
to the little scrunched-up "Love, Nancy" at the end, as if she had
squeezed it there to make it look unimportant, knowing perfectly that it
was the one really important thing in the letter to him. Both would take
it so and be thankful without greediness or a longing for sentimental
"x's," with a sense that the thing so given must be very rich in little
like a jewel, and always newly rediscovered with a shiver of pure wonder
and thanking, or neither could have borne to have it written so small.

It was Nancy just as some of her clothes were Nancy, soft clear blues
and first appleblossom pinks, the colors of a hardy garden that has
no need for the phoenix-colors of the poppy, because it has passed the
boy's necessity for talking at the top of its voice in scarlet and
can hold in one shaped fastidious petal, faint-flushed with a single
trembling of one serene living dye, all the colors the wise mind knows
and the soul released into its ecstasy has taken for its body invisible,
its body of delight most spotless, as lightning takes bright body of
rapture and agony from the light clear pallor that softens a sky to
night.

Oliver read the letter over twice--it was with a satisfaction like that
when body and brain are fed at once, invisibly, by the same lustre of
force, that he put it away. One part of it, though, left him humanly
troubled enough.

"Miss Winters, the old incubus, came around and was soppy to mother as
usual yes