When Mrs. Allan had first adopted him and set apart a room in her home for him, she had placed in a little cabinet therein the packet of letters his dying mother had given him.  She had not opened the packet, for she felt that the letters were for the actress’s child’s eye alone.  He, when he looked at it, did so with a feeling of mixed reverence and fascination which was deepened by his inability to decipher the secrets bound together by the bit of blue ribbon tied around it.  How the sight of the packet recalled to him that sad, that solemn hour in which it had been given into his hands!  When getting him ready for boarding-school, Mrs. Allan had packed the letters with his other belongings, for she was a woman of sentiment, and she felt the child should not be parted from this gift of his dying mother.  But at length, when a knowledge of writing made it possible for him to read the letters, he was possessed with a feeling of shrinking from doing so, as one might shrink from opening a message from the grave.

What grim, what terrible secrets, might not the little bundle of letters reveal!

It was not until his fifth and last year at Stoke-Newington that Edgar decided one day to look into the packet.  He was confined to his bed by slight indisposition and so had the dormitory to himself and could risk opening the letters without fear of interruption.  He untied the blue ribbon and the thin, yellowed papers, with fragments of their broken seals still sticking to them, fell apart.  He picked up the one bearing the earliest date and began to read.  It was from his father to his mother immediately after their betrothal.  His interest was at once intensely aroused and in the order in which the letters came, he read, and read, and read, with the absorption with which he might have read his first novel.  They were a revelation to him—­a revelation of a world he had not known existed, though it seemed, it lay roundabout him—­these love-letters of his parents, literally throbbing with the exalted passion of two young, ardent, poetic spirits.  The boy had not dreamed that anything so beautiful could be as this undying love of which they wrote and the language in which they made their sweet vows to each other.  His own heart throbbed in answer to what he read.  His imagination was violently wrought upon and exquisite feelings such as he had never known before awakened in his breast.

Under the spell of the letters the child-poet fell in love—­not with any creature of flesh and blood, for his entire acquaintance and association was with boys—­but with the ideal of his inner vision.  From that time, his poetic outbursts came to be filled with—­more than aught else—­the surpassing beauty, the worshipful goodness, the divine love of woman.  He was a naturally reverent boy, but for these more than mortal beings, as they appeared to his fancy, was reserved the supreme worship of his romantic soul.  Indeed, the adoration of his ideal woman—­perfect in body, in mind and in soul, became, and was to be always, a religion to him.