Most of them were given to Grizel, but a dozen or more passed without her leave into the kists of various people, where often since then they have been consulted by swains in need of a pretty phrase; and Tommy’s school-fellows, the very boys and girls who hooted the Painted Lady, were in time—­so oddly do things turn out—­to be among those whom her letters taught how to woo.  Where the kists did not let in the damp or careless fingers, the paper long remained clean, the ink but little faded.  Some of the letters were creased, as if they had once been much folded, perhaps for slipping into secret hiding-places, but none of them bore any address or a date.  “To my beloved,” was sometimes written on the cover, and inside he was darling or beloved again.  So no one could have arranged them in the order in which they were written, though there was a three-cornered one which said it was the first.  There was a violet in it, clinging to the paper as if they were fond of each other, and Grizel’s mamma had written, “The violet is me, hiding in a corner because I am so happy.”  The letters were in many moods, playful, reflective, sad, despairing, arch, but all were written in an ecstasy of the purest love, and most of them were cheerful, so that you seemed to see the sun dancing on the paper while she wrote, the same sun that afterwards showed up her painted cheeks.  Why they came back to her no one ever discovered, any more than how she who slipped the violet into that three-cornered one and took it out to kiss again and wrote, “It is my first love-letter, and I love it so much I am reluctant to let it go,” became in a few years the derision of the Double Dykes.  Some of these letters may be in old kists still, but whether that is so or not, they alone have passed the Painted Lady’s memory from one generation to another, and they have purified it, so that what she was died with her vile body, and what she might have been lived on, as if it were her true self.

CHAPTER XXXIV

WHO TOLD TOMMY TO SPEAK

“Miss Alison Cray presents her compliments to—­and requests the favor of their company at her marriage with Mr. Ivie McLean, on January 8th, at six o’clock.”

Tommy in his Sabbath clothes, with a rose from the Dovecot hot-house for buttonhole (which he slipped into his pocket when he saw other boys approaching), delivered them at the doors of the aristocracy, where, by the way, he had been a few weeks earlier, with another circular.

“Miss Alison Cray being about to give up school, has pleasure in stating that she has disposed of the good-will of her establishment to Miss Jessy Langlands and Miss S. Oram, who will enter upon their scholastic duties on January 9th, at Hoods Cottage, where she most cordially,” and so on.