“M.  Armiger.”

The editor’s letter to the young lady read: 

“Dear madam,—­Mr. P. S. Verrian has handed me your letter of the 4th, and I need not tell you that it has interested us both.

“I am almost as much gratified as he by the testimony your request bears to the importance of his work, and if I could have acted upon my instant feeling I should have had no hesitation in granting it, though it is so very unusual as to be, in my experience as an editor, unprecedented.  I am sure that you would not have made it so frankly if you had not been prepared to guard in return any confidence placed in you; but you will realize that as you are quite unknown to us, we should not be justified in taking a step so unusual as you propose without having some guarantee besides that which Mr. Verrian and I both feel from the character of your letter.  Simply, then, for purposes of identification, as the phrase is, I must beg you to ask the pastor of your church, or, better still, your family physician, to write you a line saying that he knows you, as a sort of letter of introduction to me.  Then I will send you the advance proofs of Mr. Verrian’s story.  You may like to address me personally in the care of the magazine, and not as the editor.

“Yours very respectfully,

“M.  Armiger.”

The editor’s letter was dated the 6th of the month; the answer, dated the 8th, betrayed the anxious haste of the writer in replying, and it was not her fault if what she wrote came to Verrian when he was no longer able to do justice to her confession.  Under the address given in her first letter she now began, in, a hand into which a kindlier eye might have read a pathetic perturbation: 

“Dear sir,—­I have something awful to tell you.  I might write pages without making you think better of me, and I will let you think the worst at once.  I am not what I pretended to be.  I wrote to Mr. Verrian saying what I did, and asking to see the rest of his story on the impulse of the moment.  I had been reading it, for I think it is perfectly fascinating; and a friend of mine, another girl, and I got together trying to guess how he would end it, and we began to dare each other to write to him and ask.  At first we did not dream of doing such a thing, but we went on, and just for the fun of it we drew lots to see which should write to him.  The lot fell to me; but we composed that letter together, and we put in about my dying for a joke.  We never intended to send it; but then one thing led to another, and I signed it with my real name and we sent it.  We did not really expect to hear anything from it, for we supposed he must get lots of letters about his story and never paid any attention to them.  We did not realize what we had done till I got your letter yesterday.  Then we saw it all, and ever since we have been trying to think what to do, and I do not believe either of