She shivered as she took it up.  It was a handwriting she had been accustomed to see once a year only, in one simple word of greeting, always the same word, which every year in eighteen had come to her on New Year’s wherever she was.

But this was October.

She sat perfectly still for some minutes, and then resolutely opened the letter, and read: 

“Madge:—­I am so afraid that my voice coming to you, not only across so many years, but from another world, may shock you, that I am strongly tempted not to keep my word to you, yet, judging you by myself, I feel that perhaps this will be less painful than the thought that I had passed forgetful of you, or changed toward you.  You were a mere girl when we mutually promised, that though it was Fate that our paths should not be the same, and honorable that we should keep apart, we would not pass out of life, whatever came, without a farewell word,—­a second saying ‘good-bye.’”

“It is my fate to say it.  It is now God’s will.  Before it was yours.  It is eighteen years since you chose my honor to your happiness and mine.  To-day you are a famous woman.  That is the consolation I have found in your decision.  I sometimes wonder if Fame will always make up to you for the rest.  A woman’s way is peculiar—­and right, I suppose.  I have never changed.  My son has been a second consolation, and that, too, in spite of the fact that, had he never been born, your decision might have been so different.  He is a young man now, strangely like what I was, when as a child, you first knew me, and he has always been my confidant.  In those first days of my banishment from you I kept from crying my agony from the housetops by whispering it to him.  His uncomprehending ears were my sole confessional.  His mother cared little for his companionship, and her invalidism threw him continually into my care.  I do not know when he began to understand, but from the hour he could speak he whispered your name in his prayers.  But it was only lately that, of himself, he discovered your identity.  The love I felt for you in my early days has grown with me.  It has survived in my heart when all other passions, all prides, all ambitions, long ago died.  I leave you, I hope, a good memory of me—­a man who loved you more than he loved himself, who for eighteen years has loved you silently, yet never ceased to grieve for you.  But I fear that I have bequeathed to my son, with the name and estate of his father, my hopeless love for you.  If, by chance, what I fear be true,—­if, when bereft of me, he seeks you out, as be sure he will,—­deal gently with him for his father’s sake.

“There was an old compact between us, dear.  I mention it now only in the hope that you may not have forgotten—­indeed, in the certainty that you have not.  I know you so well.  Remember it, I beg of you, only to ignore it.  It was made, you know, when one of us expected to watch the passing of the other.  This is different.  If this reminds you of it, it reminds you only to warn you that Time cancels all such compacts.  It is my voice that assures you of it.

“FELIX R.”