the lonely
grave in the churchyard in Richmond and the sad joy of the heart that
mourns evermore; with the beauty of flowers--the more beautiful because
doomed to a brief life; with the Gothic steeple, asleep in the still,
blue air, and the bell in whose deep iron throat dwelt a note that was
hollow and ghostly; with the great wall around the Manor House grounds
and with the mighty gate that swung upon hinges in which the voice of a
soul in torment seemed to be imprisoned, and with other things which
filled him with a terror that

"was not fright,
But a tremulous delight."

His learning to write bore still another fruit.

When Mrs. Allan had first adopted him and set apart a room in her home
for him, she had placed in a little cabinet therein the packet of
letters his dying mother had given him. She had not opened the packet,
for she felt that the letters were for the actress's child's eye alone.
He, when he looked at it, did so with a feeling of mixed reverence and
fascination which was deepened by his inability to decipher the secrets
bound together by the bit of blue ribbon tied around it. How the sight
of the packet recalled to him that sad, that solemn hour in which it
had been given into his hands! When getting him ready for
boarding-school, Mrs. Allan had packed the letters with his other
belongings, for she was a woman of sentiment, and she felt the child
should not be parted from this gift of his dying mother. But at length,
when a knowledge of writing made it possible for him to read the
letters, he was possessed with a feeling of shrinking from doing so, as
one might shrink from opening a message from the grave.

What grim, what terrible secrets, might not the little bundle of letters
reveal!

It was not until his fifth and last year at Stoke-Newington that Edgar
decided one day to look into the packet. He was confined to his bed by
slight indisposition and so had the dormitory to himself and could risk
opening the letters without fear of interruption. He untied the blue
ribbon and the thin, yellowed papers, with fragments of their broken
seals still sticking to them, fell apart. He picked up the one bearing
the earliest date and began to read. It was from his father to his
mother immediately after their betrothal. His interest was at once
intensely aroused and in the order in which the letters came, he read,
and read, and read, with the absorption with which he might have read
his first nove