At last I saw her body straighten.  She gave a little shake of her shoulders, as if rousing herself, and, turning from the desk, came toward me.  I saw that she held in her hand a bundle of letters.

“I understand that you and Jack made some fool agreement that he was not to write to you, and that you were not even to read his letters to me.  I’m not expressing my opinion about it, but now that he’s gone, I’m going to turn these letters over to you.  I’m not blind, you know.  Most of them were all really written to you, even if I did receive them.  Poor lad!  It seems such a pity he should be struck down just as a little happiness seemed coming his way.”

She put the letters in my hands, and, turning swiftly, went out of the room.  I knew her well enough to realize that she would not return until I had read the messages from Jack.  But what in the world did she mean by her last words?

I drew a big, easy chair to the fireside, and began to read the missives.  Some were short, some were long, but all were filled with a quiet courage and cheerfulness that I knew had illuminated not only Jack’s letters to his old friend, but his life and the lives of others wherever he had been.  Every one of them had some reference to me—­an inquiry after my health, an injunction to Mrs. Stewart to be sure to keep track of my happiness, a little kodak print or other souvenir marked “For Margaret if I do not come back.”

I felt guilty, remorseful, that I had seen so little of Mrs. Stewart since his departure.  My own affairs, especially my long, terrible summer’s experience with Grace Draper, had shut everything else from my mind.

One letter in particular made my eyes brim with sudden tears.  The first of it had been cheery, with entertaining little accounts of the few poor bits of humor which the soldiers in the trenches extracted from their terrible every day round.  Along toward the end a sudden impulse seemed to have swept the writer’s pen into a more sombre channel.

“I have been thinking much, dear old friend,” he wrote, “of the futility of human desires.  Life in the trenches is rather conducive to that form of mediation, as you may imagine.  You know, none better, how I loved Margaret, how I wanted to make her my wife—­I often wonder whether if I had not delayed so long, ‘fearing my fate too much,’ I might not have won her.  But thoughts, like that are worse than useless.

“Instead, there has come to me a clearer understanding of Margaret, a better insight into the golden heart of her.  If she had never met the other man, or some one like him, I believe I could have made her happy, kept her contented.  But I realize fully that having met him there could never be any other man for her but him.  Her love for him is like a flame, transforming her.  I could never have called forth such passion from her.  I see clearly now how foolish it was in me to have hoped it.  There was nothing in the humdrum, commonplace brotherly affection which she thought I gave her to arouse the romance which I know slumbers under that calm, cold exterior of hers.