“She sent it,” he muttered, “and perhaps there is something written in it. She may have written, ‘I hope you will like this book, Henry;’ or, ‘This is the story we spoke of, Henry;’ or, ‘When will you be able to start to school again, Henry?’”
The observing reader will perceive that in each of those sentences the hero’s own name occurs. Henry was capable of strong feelings; in some respects he was a boy; in others, a man.
At last, at the top of a useless fly-leaf, he came upon two initial letters. They were not hers; they were not his. The writing was very bad; he could not recognize it. He did not consider that a book-seller often scrawls a cipher or two on the fly-leaves of his books. He was mystified.
Jealousy, however, soon suggested an explanation; jealousy pointed out that those characters were written by her, and that they stood for “J. J.”
Once more he was miserable.
He saw Johnny Jones in his true colors; saw all his defects, all his emptiness, all his insignificance, all his baseness. And yet he was jealous!
The lover very often feels his rival to be the most despicable person on the face of the earth; and yet, at the same instant, he fears that rival, despicable as he is, will steal away the heart of his beloved.
To a man whose thoughts never rise above the earth on which he walks, this may seem preposterous; but it is true, and may easily be explained—so easily, in fact, that the writer leaves it for some one who can do so more ably and clearly than himself.
It has been said that Henry was fated never to explore the Demon’s Cave. He never did.