THE PACKET OF LETTERS.
THIS silence lasted, I suppose, some eight or ten minutes, each waiting for the other to speak first.
Then the door burst open, and Maimie rushed in,—her eyes sparkling, and a packet of papers in her hand.
“Look!” she cried,—“these are for you to see, Uncle Robert,—and Aunt Marion too, if she likes. Three are letters from father to me—one before he married mother, and two afterwards. And there are letters from him to mother, which she gave me, and told me I was to keep. And the others are between mother and me, when I was at school, and she was thinking of marrying again. I didn’t like it at all then, for I did not know he would be so kind to me.”
She laid the letters on my husband’s knee, breathing quickly with excitement. I saw Jack hovering outside the door, in attendance on her steps. He thrust his head in now, and said,—“Come, Maimie! Couldn’t get her to touch a drop of tea, till the box was open, and she had hauled out those papers. Come along, Maimie!”
And Maimie went. I kept silence still; and my husband as silently opened the uppermost letter, and read, passing it on to me. He was always a man of few words. I, on the contrary, was burning to speak; yet a certain dread of saying the wrong thing restrained me.
The letters between Maimie and her mother made the matter clear enough. They were very free and affectionate outpourings. Mrs. Browne spoke cautiously at first of a certain Mr. Hazel, but very soon went on to the mention of a coming stepfather. Maimie’s answers were full of passionate remonstrances, gradually lessening. A kind little note from Churton came in here, addressed to the excited school-girl. “Churton himself!” my husband murmured over it, and I could have echoed the words. The two from him, after the marriage, were equally characteristic. He called her rather effusively, “his dear little fair-haired dove.”
“By no means a dove-like nature,” I muttered.
The two or three letters from Churton Hazel to his wife came last; and had any further proof been needed they would have supplied it.
“Well,” my husband said at length. He pressed the little pile of papers together, sighed, and turned to me. “Well, Marion?”