“But meantime!  Ah, you will not know it, but words will rise —­the heart must find utterance.  What the lip cannot utter, nor the looks reveal, these pages shall hold in sacred trust for you till the day when my father will place my hand in yours, with heart-felt approval.

  “Is it a folly?  A woman’s weak evasion of the strong silence of
  man?  You may say so some day; but somehow, I doubt it—­I doubt
  it.”

The creaking of a chair;—­the man within had seated himself.  There was no other sound; a soul in turmoil wakens no echoes.  Sweetwater envied the walls surrounding the unsympathetic reader.  They could see.  He could only listen.

A little while; then that slight rustling again of the unfolding sheet.  The following was read, and then the fourth and last: 

  “Dearest: 

  “Did you think I had never seen you till that day we met in Lenox? 
  I am going to tell you a secret—­a great, great secret—­such a
  one as a woman hardly whispers to her own heart.

“One day, in early summer, I was sitting in St. Bartholomew’s Church on Fifth Avenue, waiting for the services to begin.  It was early and the congregation was assembling.  While idly watching the people coming in, I saw a gentleman pass by me up the aisle, who made me forget all the others.  He had not the air of a New Yorker; he was not even dressed in city style, but as I noted his face and expression, I said way down in my heart, ’That is the kind of man I could love; the only man I have ever seen who could make me forget my own world and my own people.’  It was a passing thought, soon forgotten.  But when in that hour of embarrassment and peril on Greylock Mountain, I looked up into the face of my rescuer and saw again that countenance which so short a time before had called into life impulses till then utterly unknown, I knew that my hour was come.  And that was why my confidence was so spontaneous and my belief in the future so absolute.

“I trust your love which will work wonders; and I trust my own, which sprang at a look but only gathered strength and permanence when I found that the soul of the man I loved bettered his outward attractions, making the ideal of my foolish girlhood seem as unsubstantial and evanescent as a dream in the glowing noontide.”

  “My Own: 

  “I can say so now; for you have written to me, and I have the
  dancing words with which to silence any unsought doubt which might
  subdue the exuberance of these secret outpourings.

“I did not expect this.  I thought that you would remain as silent as myself.  But men’s ways are not our ways.  They cannot exhaust longing in purposeless words on scraps of soulless paper, and I am glad that they cannot.  I love you for your impatience; for your purpose, and for the manliness which will win for you yet all that you covet of fame, accomplishment and love.  You expect no reply, but there are ways in which one can keep silent and yet speak.  Won’t you be surprised when your answer comes in a manner you have never thought of?”

XX