t of all. Armiger wrote:

"MY DEAR VERRIAN,--I enclose two exhibits which will possess you of all
the facts in the case of the young lady who feared she might die before
she read the end of your story, but who, you will be glad to find,
is likely to live through the year. As the story ends in our October
number, she need not be supplied with advance sheets. I am sorry the
house hurried out a paragraph concerning the matter, but it will not be
followed by another. Perhaps you will feel, as I do, that the incident
is closed. I have not replied to the writer, and you need not return her
letter. Yours ever,

"M. ARMIGER."

The editor's letter to the young lady read:

"DEAR MADAM,--Mr. P. S. Verrian has handed me your letter of the 4th,
and I need not tell you that it has interested us both.

"I am almost as much gratified as he by the testimony your request bears
to the importance of his work, and if I could have acted upon my instant
feeling I should have had no hesitation in granting it, though it is so
very unusual as to be, in my experience as an editor, unprecedented. I
am sure that you would not have made it so frankly if you had not been
prepared to guard in return any confidence placed in you; but you will
realize that as you are quite unknown to us, we should not be justified
in taking a step so unusual as you propose without having some guarantee
besides that which Mr. Verrian and I both feel from the character of
your letter. Simply, then, for purposes of identification, as the phrase
is, I must beg you to ask the pastor of your church, or, better still,
your family physician, to write you a line saying that he knows you, as
a sort of letter of introduction to me. Then I will send you the advance
proofs of Mr. Verrian's story. You may like to address me personally in
the care of the magazine, and not as the editor.

"Yours very respectfully,

"M. ARMIGER."

The editor's letter was dated the 6th of the month; the answer, dated
the 8th, betrayed the anxious haste of the writer in replying, and
it was not her fault if what she wrote came to Verrian when he was no
longer able to do justice to her confession. Under the address given
in her first letter she now began, in, a hand into which a kindlier eye
might have read a pathetic perturbation:

"DEAR SIR,--I have something awful to tell you. I might write pages
without making you think better of me,