I got on my bicycle and rode off, and I made good time until I crossed the bridge.  Then I had to walk along the river, pushing the bicycle, and I came to those two boys so quietly that they never saw me until I was right behind them.  They were fishing still, but they had both been swimming—­I could tell that by their wet hair and by the damp, mussy look of their clothes.  When Billy saw me he turned red and began to make a great fuss over his line.  He didn’t say a word; he never does when he’s surprised or ashamed, so he doesn’t speak very often, anyhow; but I broke the painful silence by saying a few words myself.  I told Billy how dreadful he had made everybody feel and how they were all blaming me, and I said I’d thank him for that letter to take home to his poor suffering sister.  Billy put down his rod, and all the time I talked he was going through his pockets one after the other and getting redder and redder.  I was so busy talking that I didn’t understand at first just what this meant, but when I stopped and held out my hand and looked at him hard I saw in his guilty face the terrible, terrible fear that he had lost that letter; and I was so frightened that my legs gave way under me, and I sat down on the grass in my fresh blue linen dress, just where they had dripped and made it wet.

All this time Sidney Tracy was going through his pockets, too, and just as I was getting up again in a hurry he took off his cap and emptied his pockets into it.  I wish you could have seen what that cap held then—­worms, and sticky chewing-gum, and tops, and strings, and hooks, and marbles, and two pieces of molasses candy all soft and messy, and a little bit of a turtle, and a green toad, and a slice of bread-and-butter, and a dirty, soaking, handkerchief that he and Billy had used for a towel.  There was something else there, too—­a dark, wet, pulpy, soggy-looking thing with pieces of gum and molasses candy and other things sticking to it.  Sidney took it out and held it toward me in a proud, light-hearted way: 

“There’s your letter, all right,” he said, and Billy gave a whoop of joy and called out, “Good-bye, Alice,” as a hint for me to hurry home.  I was so anxious to get the letter that I almost took it, but I stopped in time.  I hadn’t any gloves on, and it was just too dreadful.  If you could have seen it you would never have touched it in the world.  I got near enough to look at it, though, and then I saw that the address was so dirty and so covered with gum and bait and candy that all I could read was a capital “M” and a small “s” at the beginning and an “ert” at the end; the name between was hidden.  I covered my eyes with my hand and gasped out to the boys that I wanted the things taken off it that didn’t belong there, and when I looked again Sidney had scraped off the worst of it and was scrubbing the envelope with his wet handkerchief to make it look cleaner.  After that you couldn’t tell what any letter was, so I just groaned and snatched it from his hands and left those two boys in their disgusting dirt and degradation and went home.