* *

"It was all a mistake,--my going away," she wrote some days after. "I
ought to have stayed at the school, and graduated, and then come down
to New York, and faced things. I have my lesson now about facing
things. If any other crisis comes into my life, I hope I shall be as
strong as Dante was, when he 'showed himself more furnished with
breath than he was,' and said, 'Go on, for I am strong and resolute.'
I think we always have more strength than we understand ourselves to
have.

"I am so wonderfully happy about Uncle David and Aunt Margaret, and I
know Uncle Jimmie needs Aunt Gertrude and has always needed her. Did
my going away help those things to their fruition? I hope so.

"I can not bear to think of Aunt Beulah, but I know that I must bear
to think of her, and face the pain of having hurt her as I must face
every other thing that comes into my life from this hour. I would give
her back Peter, if I could,--but I can not. He is mine, and I am his,
and we have been that way from the beginning. I have thought of him
always as stronger and wiser than any one in the world, but I don't
think he is. He has suffered and stumbled along, trying blindly to do
right, hurting Aunt Beulah and mixing up his life like any man, just
the way Uncle Jimmie and Uncle David did.

"Don't men know who it is they love? They seem so often to be
struggling hungrily after the wrong thing, trying to get, or to make
themselves take, some woman that they do not really want. When women
love it is not like that with them.

"When women love! I think I have loved Peter from the first minute I
saw him, so beautiful and dear and sweet, with that _anxious_ look in
his eyes,--that look of consideration for the other person that is
always so much a part of him. He had it the first night I saw him,
when Uncle David brought me to show me to my foster parents for the
first time. It was the thing I grew up by, and measured men and their
attitude to women by--just that look in his eyes, that tender warm
look of consideration.

"It means a good many things, I think,--a gentle generous nature, and
a tender chivalrous heart. It means selflessness. It means being a
good man, and one who _protects_ by sheer unselfish instinct. I don't
know how I shall ever heal him of the hurt he has done Aunt Beulah.
Aunt Margaret tells me that Aunt Beulah's experience with him has been
the thing that has made her whole, that she needed to live through th