“I’ll see you tomorrow, dearest,” he whispered.

“Not if I can help it,” I said, looking straight ahead.  Hannah had dropped a stocking—­not her own.  One of the Xmas favors—­and was fumbling about for it.

“You are tired and unerved to-night, Bab.  When I have seen your father tomorrow, and talked to him——­”

“Don’t you dare to see my father.”

“——­and when he has agreed to what I propose,” he went on, without paying any atention to what I had said, “you will be calmer.  We can plan things.”

Hannah came puffing up then, and he helped us into the motor.  He was very careful to see that we were covered with the robes, and he tucked Hannah’s feet in.  She was awfully flattered.  Old Fool!  And she babbled about him until I wanted to slap her.

“He’s a nice young man.  Miss Bab,” she said.  “That is, if he’s the One.  And he has nice manners.  So considerate.  Many a party I’ve taken your sister to, and never before——­”

“I wish you’d shut up, Hannah,” I said.  “He’s a Pig, and I hate him.”

She sulked after that, and helped me out of my things at home without a word.  When I was in bed, however, and she was hanging up my clothes, she said: 

“I don’t know what’s got into you, Miss Barbara.  You are that cross that there’s no living with you.”

“Oh, go away,” I said.

“And what’s more,” she added, “I don’t know but what your mother ought to know about these goingson.  You’re only a little girl, with all your high and mightiness, and there’s going to be no scandal in this Familey if I can help it.”

I put the bedclothes over my head, and she went out.

But of course I could not sleep.  Sis was not home yet, or mother, and I went into Sis’s room and got a novel from her table.  It was the story of a woman who had married a man in a hurry, and without really loving him, and when she had been married a year, and hated the very way her husband drank his coffee and cut the ends off his cigars, she found some one she really loved with her Whole Heart.  And it was too late.  But she wrote him one Letter, the other man, you know, and it caused a lot of trouble.  So she said—­I remember the very words—­

“Half the troubles in the world are caused by Letters.  Emotions are changable things”—­this was after she had found that she really loved her husband after all, but he had had to shoot himself before she found it out, although not fataly—­“but the written word does not change.  It remains always, embodying a dead truth and giving it apparent life.  No woman should ever put her thoughts on paper.”

She got the Letter back, but she had to steal it.  And it turned out that the other man had really only wanted her money all the time.

That story was a real ilumination to me.  I shall have a great deal of money when I am of age, from my grandmother.  I saw it all.  It was a trap sure enough.  And if I was to get out I would have to have the letter.