ack I
almost believe now that he did, for he was too true as well as strong
to be 'trapped' by any woman--I must have hurt him by keeping him so at
a distance. He couldn't have understood, not even with the wonderful
power he had of seeing deep into people, all the way through to their
souls. But now I have explained to you about mother, _you_ will
understand. We were hardly alone together, he and I, for more than five
minutes at a time. I always made some excuse to escape. I was afraid if
I were with him for long I should break down and be a fool. And I
thought if he didn't love me I should certainly disgust him by crying.
Mother had told me often, when she was training me to 'come out' in
society, that a man must love a woman _very_ much, not to be irritated
with her when she cries, and her face crinkles up and her nose gets red.

"After our wedding he was with me for about an hour, but mother was
with us too, for half the time, and even when she left us alone in an
ostentatious sort of way, I could think of nothing to say to him,
nothing at all. There were a thousand things in my brain,
will-o'-the-wisp things, but my tongue could not catch up with them. I
let him go. And then it was too late.

"Three weeks afterwards, he died, saving the life of a friend. So now
you see what your book meant to me, very specially, and why I begged
you to tell me whether you had found out these wonderful things by
going down close to death yourself. You know why it wasn't enough even
when you answered as you did at first. I longed to hear whether you
thought _he_ would know the truth about me. Your answer to that
question is all I hoped for, and more. But I don't deserve it, for I am
married now to my cousin--the one I so childishly made an idol of when
I was a little girl.

"You are shocked. You think of me with horror. You are sorry you have
troubled with me at all. When you read at the beginning of this letter
that I had given another man a 'place in my life,' you didn't dream
that I had _married him_. But so it is. Eight months after my love
died, and my youth died with him, I was my cousin's wife.

"I won't tell you much about that. Only this: a month after I was a
widow, this cousin came to England, wounded. My mother and I were
helping the nurses as best we knew how, in the private hospital of a
friend. My cousin arranged to be sent there. He wasn't seriously hurt,
and we saw something of him, of course. He was immensely ch