“I’ve been writing most of the day.  It’s evening now, and I’m tired.  I was going to tell more.  Tell you of things that happened afterward—­tell you why you found me where you did find me.  But now I don’t believe I want to tell those things.  They’re too awful.  They’d hurt you—­haunt you.  And that’s not what I want to do.  What I want is to make you understand, and if the part I’ve told hasn’t done that—­

“‘I think it was to save Ann you were going to give up Verna,’ you said.  Oh Katie—­how did you know?  How do you know?

“And then you called to me.  You weren’t sick at all—­were you, Katie?  Oh I soon guessed that it was the wonderful goodness of your heart—­not the disease of it—­caused that ‘attack.’

“Then those beautiful days began.  I wanted to talk about what those days meant—­what you meant—­what our play—­our dream meant.  Things I thought that I never said—­how proud I was you should want to make up those stories about me—­how I wanted to be the things you said I was—­and oh, Katie dear, the trouble you got me into by loving to tell those stories—­telling one to one man and another to another!  I’d never known any one full of play like you—­yet play that is so much more than just play.  Sometimes a picture of Centralia would come to me when I’d hear you telling about my having lived in Florence.  Sometimes when I was listening to stories of things you and I had done in Italy I’d see that old place where I used to put suspenders in boxes—!  Katie, how strange it all was.  How did it happen that things you made up were things I had dreamed about without really knowing what I was dreaming?  How wonderful you were, Katie—­how good—­to put me in the things of my dreams rather than the things of my life.  The world doesn’t do that for us.

“It seems a ridiculous thing to be mentioning, when I owe you so many things too wonderful to mention—­but you know I do owe you some money.  I took what was in my purse.  I hope I can pay it back.  I’m so tired just now it doesn’t seem to me I ever can—­but if I don’t, don’t associate it with my not paying back the missionary money!

“Katie, do you know how I’d like to pay you back?  I’d like to give you the most beautiful things I’ve ever dreamed.  And I hope that some of them, at least, are waiting somewhere—­and not very far off—­for you.  How I used to love to hear you laugh—­watch you play your tricks on people—­so funny and so dear—­

“Now that’s over.  Katie, I don’t believe it’s all my fault, and I know it’s not yours.  It’s our two worlds.  You see you couldn’t fit me in.

“I used to be afraid it must end like that.  Yet most of the time I felt so secure—­that was the wonder of you—­that you could make me so beautifully secure.  And your brother, Katie, have you told him?  I don’t care if you do, only if you tell him anything, won’t you try and make him understand everything?  I couldn’t bear it to think he might think me—­oh those things I don’t believe you really think me.