Dearie:  I am just wondering if you thought as much about something so sweet that happened last night as I did you know what.  I think it was the sweetest thing.  I send you one with this note and I hope you will think it is a sweet one.  I would give you a real one if you were here now and I hope you would think it was sweeter still than the one I put in this note.  It is the sweetest thing now you are mine and I am yours forever kiddo.  If you come around about friday eve it will be all right. aunt Jess will be gone back home by then so come early and we will get Sade and Alb and go to the band Concert.  Don’t forget what I said about my putting something sweet in this note, and I hope you will think it is a sweet one but not as sweet as the real sweet one I would like to—­

At this point Ramsey impulsively tore the note into small pieces.  He turned cold as his imagination projected a sketch of his mother in the act of reading this missive, and of her expression as she read the sentence:  “It is the sweetest thing now you are mine and I am yours forever kiddo.”  He wished that Milla hadn’t written “kiddo.”  She called him that, sometimes, but in her warm little voice the word seemed not at all what it did in ink.  He wished, too, that she hadn’t said she was his forever.

Suddenly he was seized with a horror of her.

Moisture broke out heavily upon him; he felt a definite sickness, and, wishing for death, went forth upon the streets to walk and walk.  He cared not whither, so that his feet took him in any direction away from Milla, since they were unable to take him away from himself—­of whom he had as great a horror.  Her loving face was continually before him, and its sweetness made his flesh creep.  Milla had been too sweet.

When he met or passed people, it seemed to him that perhaps they were able to recognize upon him somewhere the marks of his low quality.  “Softy!  Ole sloppy fool!” he muttered, addressing himself.  “Slushy ole mush!... Spooner!” And he added, “Yours forever, kiddo!” Convulsions seemed about to seize him.

Turning a corner with his head down, he almost charged into Dora Yocum.  She was homeward bound from a piano lesson, and carried a rolled leather case of sheet music—­something he couldn’t imagine Milla carrying—­and in her young girl’s dress, which attempted to be nothing else, she looked as wholesome as cold spring water.  Ramsey had always felt that she despised him and now, all at once, he thought that she was justified.  Leper that he had become, he was unworthy to be even touching his cap to her!  And as she nodded and went briskly on, he would have given anything to turn and walk a little way with her, for it seemed to him that this might fumigate his morals.  But he lacked the courage, and, besides, he considered himself unfit to be seen walking with her.