How he had loved her! ...  No other thought could find entrance in his mind ... and now, it was all over.  She belonged to some one else and had left him without a thought, almost, of the pain it was going to bring him.  “Hard to understand!” She was wrong:  he had understood it from the first, and far better than she.  Had he not told her so that afternoon when they sat together in the barn?  But understanding it made it no more easy to bear.  He wondered whether he could bear it.  He seemed so cruelly alone with his sorrow.  The silence seemed shouting at him.

Suddenly, without knowing why, he looked back to the barn.  A little figure, wrapped in a plaid shawl, was coming towards him:  it was his mother.  A sharp thrill of tenderness ran through him.  “Poor little mother,” he said softly, “you are longing to help me,” and, somewhat ashamed of the way in which he had left her recently, he turned and walked back to meet her.

“Come with me to the barn,” she said, and together they returned, silently, each timid of the other.  Entering the building they sat down on the hay, side by side.  “Read that, mother,” he said, and handed her the letter.  She glanced it through, and then, taking his hand in hers, faltered gently, “My poor boy!  I can guess what it must mean to you.”

He put his head down in her lap and sobbed like a child, while she stroked his hair and face and spoke shy words of sympathy.

“David,” she said, “it was for your father and me that you gave up college.  Perhaps you think we don’t appreciate it, because we never say much.  I know what it has cost you and how nobly you have stuck to your duty, and you know that in God’s sight whatever may come of it you have done the kindest thing.”

“Oh, but mother, that doesn’t make it any easier to lose Janet.  She was so much to me, and we were going to be so happy together.”

“Hush, little boy, you mustn’t take it so hard.  Perhaps some day you’ll see that it was for the best.”

The afternoon light was fading and the rain was beginning to fall softly outside.  In the dimming light the two continued sitting there together, hardly speaking a word, for what comfort could words bring?  And slowly a vague peacefulness began to fall upon his heart under the gentle touch of his mother, and rising, he kissed her silently and went out to his work.

Literary Monthly, 1902.

THE ENDITING OF LETTERS

STUART P. SHERMAN ’03

  “Now for enditing of Letters:  alas, what need wee much adoe about a
  little matter?”