* * * * *

An hour later the boy’s mother sat in her room at the hotel and opened a tin box of letters, found with his traps, and given her with the rest.  She had planned it for this time and had left the box unopened.  To-morrow she must take up life and try to carry it, with the boy gone, but to-day she must and would be what is called morbid.  She looked over the bend in the river to the white-dotted cemetery—­she could tell where lay the new mound, flower-covered, above his yellow head.  She looked away quickly and bent over the box in her lap and turned the key.  Her own handwriting met her eyes first; all her letters for six months back were there, scattered loosely about the box.  She gathered them up, slipping them through her fingers to be sure of the writing.  Letter after letter, all hers.

“They were his love-letters,” she said to herself.  “He never had any others, dear little boy—­my dear little boy!”

Underneath were more letters, a package first; quite a lot of them, thirty, fifty—­it was hard to guess—­held together by a rubber strap.  The strap broke as she drew out the first envelope and they fell all about her, some on the floor, but she did not notice it, for the address was in a feminine writing that had a vague familiarity.  She stopped a moment, with the envelope in one hand and the fingers of the other hand on the folded paper inside.  It felt like a dishonorable thing to do—­like prying into the boy’s secrets, forcing his confidence; and she had never done that.  Yet some one must know whether these papers of his should be burned or kept, and who was there but herself?  She drew out the letter.  It began “My dearest.”  The boy’s mother stopped short and drew a trembling breath, with a sharp, jealous pain.  She had not known.  Then she lifted her head and saw the dots of white on the green earth across the bay and her heart grew soft for that other woman to whom he had been “dearest” too, who must suffer this sorrow of losing him too.  But she could not read her letters, she must send them, take them to her, and tell her that his mother had held them sacred.  She turned to the signature.

“And so you must believe, darling, that I am and always will be—­always, always, with love and kisses, your own dear, little ’Good Queen Bess.’”

It was not the sort of an ending to a letter she would have expected from the girl he loved, for the boy, though most undemonstrative, had been intense and taken his affections seriously always.  But one can never tell, and the girl was probably quite young.  But who was she?  The signature gave no clew; the date was two years before, and from New York—­sufficiently vague!  She would have to read until she found the thread, and as she read the wonder grew that so flimsy a personality could have held her boy.  One letter, two, three, six, and yet no sign to identify the writer.  She wrote first from New York on the