y until after dark. This refreshed
my overwrought nerves, and when at nine o'clock in the evening I joined my
uncle in the library, I was calmer than he.

We said very few words. I sat on his knee, with one arm around his neck,
and hand in hand we reverently lifted the frail, trembling sheets.

We learned nothing new; in fact, almost any one of the letters was a
rounded revelation of Esther's nature, and of the great love she bore--and
there was little more to learn. There were more than a hundred of the
letters, and they embraced a period of fifteen years. We arranged them in
piles, each year by itself; for some years there were only two or three;
we wondered whether during those years they had lived near each other, and
so had not written, or whether the letters had been destroyed. When the
last letter was laid where it belonged, we looked at each other in
silence, and we both sighed.

Uncle Jo spoke first.

"Childie, what shall we do with them?"

"I do not know, uncle," I said. "I should feel very guilty if we did not
make sure that no one else read them. I should feel very guilty myself,
except that I have read them with you. They seem to me to belong to you,
somehow."

Uncle Jo kissed me, and we were silent again. Then he said, "There is but
one way to make sure that no human being will ever read them--that is, to
burn them; but it is as hard for me to do it as if they had been written
to me."

"Could you not put them back in the stair, and nail it up firmly?" said I.

It was a stormy night. The wind was blowing hard, and sleet and snow
driving against the windows. At this instant a terrible gust rattled the
icy branches of the syringa-bushes against the window, with a noise like
the click of musketry, and above the howling of the wind there came a
strange sound which sounded like a voice crying, "Burn, burn!"

Uncle Jo and I both heard it, and both sprang to our feet, white with a
nervous terror. In a second he recovered himself, and said, laughing, "Pet
we are both a good deal shaken by this business. But I do think it will be
safer to burn the letters. Poor, poor Esther. I hope she is safe with her
lover now."

"Oh, do you doubt it?" said I; "I do not."

"No," said he, "I do not, either. Thank God!"

"Uncle Jo," said I, "do you think Esther would mind if I copied a few of
these letters, and two or three of the poems? I so want to have them that
it seems to me I cannot give them up; I love her so, I