“You do beat the band!” she cried.  “You’ve watched for two days and been provoked because that letter didn’t come.  Now you’ve got it, there you sit like a mummy and let your mind be so filled with this idiotic drivel that you’re not ever reading John Jardine’s letter that is to tell you what both of us are crazy to know.”

“If you were in any mood to be fair and honest, you’d admit that you never read a finer letter than that,” said Kate.  “As for this, I never was so afraid in all my life.  Look at that!”

She threw the envelope in Nancy Ellen’s lap.

“That is the very first line of John Jardine’s writing I have ever seen,” she said.  “Do you see anything about it to encourage me to go farther?”

“You Goose!” cried the exasperated Nancy Ellen.  “I suppose he transacts so much business he scarcely ever puts pen to paper.  What’s the difference how he writes?  Look at what he is and what he does!  Go on and read his letter.”

Kate arose and walked to the window, turning her back to Nancy Ellen, who sat staring at her, while she read John Jardine’s letter.  Once Nancy Ellen saw Kate throw up her head and twist her neck as if she were choking; then she heard a great gulping sob down in her throat; finally Kate turned and stared at her with dazed, incredulous eyes.  Slowly she dropped the letter, deliberately set her foot on it, and leaving the room, climbed the stairs.  Nancy Ellen threw George Holt’s letter aside and snatched up John Jardine’s.  She read: 

My derest Kate:  I am a day late with this becos as I told you I have no schooling and in writing a letter is where I prove it, so I never write them, but it was not fare to you for you not to know what kind of a letter I would write if I did write one, so here it is very bad no dout but the best I can possably do which has got nothing at all to do with my pashion for you and the aughful time I will have till I here from you.  If you can stand for this telagraf me and I will come first train and we will forget this and I will never write another letter.  With derest love from Mother, and from me all the love of my hart.  Forever yours only, John Jardine.

The writing would have been a discredit to a ten-year-old schoolboy.  Nancy Ellen threw the letter back on the floor; with a stiffly extended finger, she poked it into the position in which she thought she had found it, and slowly stepped back.

“Great God!” she said amazedly.  “What does the man mean?  Where does that dainty and wonderful little mother come in?  She must be a regular parasite, to take such ease and comfort for herself out of him, and not see that he had time and chance to do better than that for himself.  Kate will never endure it, never in the world!  And by the luck of the very Devil, there comes that school-proof thing in the same mail, from that abominable George Holt, and Kate reads it first. It’s too bad!  I can’t believe it!  What did his mother mean?”