gers. She believed that she sometimes had a kind of second-sight
about letters, and could tell before she read them whether they brought
good or evil tidings. She put this one down on the table in front of her
while she poured her tea. At last, with a little shiver of expectancy,
she tore open the envelope and read:--

Boston, February --

MY DEAR HILDA:--

It is after twelve o'clock. Every one else is in bed and I am sitting
alone in my study. I have been happier in this room than anywhere else
in the world. Happiness like that makes one insolent. I used to think
these four walls could stand against anything. And now I scarcely know
myself here. Now I know that no one can build his security upon the
nobleness of another person. Two people, when they love each other,
grow alike in their tastes and habits and pride, but their moral natures
(whatever we may mean by that canting expression) are never welded. The
base one goes on being base, and the noble one noble, to the end.

The last week has been a bad one; I have been realizing how things used
to be with me. Sometimes I get used to being dead inside, but lately it
has been as if a window beside me had suddenly opened, and as if all the
smells of spring blew in to me. There is a garden out there, with stars
overhead, where I used to walk at night when I had a single purpose and
a single heart. I can remember how I used to feel there, how beautiful
everything about me was, and what life and power and freedom I felt in
myself. When the window opens I know exactly how it would feel to be out
there. But that garden is closed to me. How is it, I ask myself, that
everything can be so different with me when nothing here has changed?
I am in my own house, in my own study, in the midst of all these quiet
streets where my friends live. They are all safe and at peace with
themselves. But I am never at peace. I feel always on the edge of danger
and change.

I keep remembering locoed horses I used to see on the range when I was
a boy. They changed like that. We used to catch them and put them up in
the corral, and they developed great cunning. They would pretend to eat
their oats like the other horses, but we knew they were always scheming
to get back at the loco.

It seems that a man is meant to live only one life in this world. When
he tries to live a second, he develops another nature. I feel as if
a second man had been grafted into me. At first he seemed only a
pleasur