I had never opened the trunk since her death.  The exciting, almost tragic experiences of my life with Dicky had swept all the old days into the background.  I could not analyze the change that had come over me.  As I lifted the lid of the trunk and took from the top tray the inlaid box which my mother’s hands had last touched, my grief for her was mingled with a strange new longing to find out anything I could concerning the father I had never known.

“For my daughter Margaret’s eyes alone.”

The superscription on the envelope which I held in my hand stared up at me with all the sentience of a living thing.  The letters were in the crabbed, trembling, old-fashioned handwriting of my mother—­the last words that she had ever written.  It was as if she had come back from the dead to talk to me.

With the memory of my mother’s advice, I hesitated for a long time before breaking the seal.  With the letters pressed close against my tear-wet cheeks I sat for a long time, busy with memories of my mother and debating whether or not I had the right to open the letter.

I certainly was not in desperate straits, and I could not conscientiously say that I no longer harbored any resentment toward^the father of whom I had no recollection.  I felt that never in my life could I fully pardon the man who had made my mother suffer so terribly.  But the longing to know something of my father, which I had felt since the coming into my life of Robert Gordon, had become almost an obsession, with me.

“Little mother,” I whispered, “forgive me if I am doing wrong, but I must know what is in this letter to me.”

With trembling fingers I broke the seal and drew out the closely written pages which the envelope contained.

“Mother’s Only Comfort,” the letter began, and at the sight of the dear familiar words, which I had so often heard from my mother’s lips—­it was the name she had given me when a tiny girl, and which she used until the day of her death—­tears again blinded my eyes.

“When you read this I shall have left you forever.  It is my prayer that when the time comes for you to read it, it will be because you have forgiven your father, not because you are in desperate need.  How I wish I could have seen you safe in the shelter of a good man’s love before I had to go away from you forever!”

“Safe in the shelter of a good man’s love,” I repeated the words thoughtfully.  Had my mother been given her wish when she could no longer witness its fulfilment?  I was angry and humiliated at myself that I could not give a swift, unqualified assent to my own question.  A “good man” Dicky certainly was, and I was in the “shelter of his love” at present.  But “safe” with Dicky I was afraid I could never be.  Mingled always with my love for him, my trust in him, was a tiny undercurrent of uncertainty as to the stability of my husband’s affection for me.

As I turned to my mother’s letter again, there was a tiny pang at my heart at the thought that by my marriage with Dicky I had thwarted the dearest wish of my little mother’s heart.