They were turning out the cabinet drawer, when they found the bundle of
letters. Mamma had marked it in her sharp, three cornered hand-writing:
"Correspondence, Mary."
"Dear me," she said, "I didn't know I'd kept those letters."
She slipped them from the rubber band and looked at them. You could see
Uncle Victor's on the top, then Maurice Jourdain's. You heard the click
of her tongue that dismissed those useless, unimportant things. The slim,
yellowish letter at the bottom was Miss Lambert's.
"Tt-tt--"
"Oh, let me see that."
She looked over her mother's shoulder. They read together.
"We don't want her to go.... She made us love her more in one fortnight
than girls we've had with us for years.... Perhaps some day we may have
her again."
The poor, kind woman. The kind, dead woman. Years ago dead; her poor
voice rising up, a ghostlike wail over your "unbelief."
That was only the way she began.
"I say--I say!"
The thin voice was quivering with praise. Incredible, bewildering praise.
"Remarkable.--remarkable".--You would have thought there had never been
such a remarkable child as Mary Olivier.
It came back to her. She could see Miss Lambert talking to her father on
the platform at Victoria. She could see herself, excited, running up the
flagged walk at Five Elms. And Mamma coming down the hall. And what
happened then. The shock and all the misery that came after.
"That was the letter you wouldn't let me read."
"What do you mean?"
"The day I came back. I asked you to let me read it and you wouldn't."
"Really, Mary, you accuse me of the most awful things. I don't believe I
wouldn't let you read it."
"You didn't. I remember. You didn't want me to know--"
"Well," her mother said, giving in suddenly, "if I didn't, it was because
I thought it would make you even more conceited than you were. I don't
suppose I was very well pleased with you at the time."
"Still--you kept it."
But her mother was not even going to admit that she had kept it.