Nathanael watched her for a minute. “You are very neat-handed, Agatha, and it is kind of you to help me.”
“Oh, I would help any one.” Foolish, thoughtless words! He said no more, but went and looked over the cabinet.
This was a sadder duty. There were letters extending over more than a half century. The Squire received so few that he seemed never to have burnt one. The oldest—fifty years old—were love-letters, of the time when people wrote love-letters beginning “Honoured Miss,” and “Dear and respected Sir,” overlaying the plain heart-truth with no sentimentalisms of the pen. The signatures, “Catherine Grey,” and “Nathanael Harper,” in round, formal, girl and boy hand, told how young they were when this correspondence began;—young still, when its sudden ceasing showed that courtship had become marriage. From that time, for nearly twenty years, there was scarcely a letter signed Catharine Harper.
“This looks,” said Agatha, who unconsciously to both had come to stand by her husband and share in his task—“this looks as if they were so rarely parted that they had no need for letter-writing.”
“It was so: I believe my father and mother lived very happily together.”
“I should like to read these letters all through, if I might? They are the only love-letters I ever saw.”
“Are they, indeed?”
The sharp questioning look startled Agatha. She remembered that first letter of Nathanael's—perhaps he was vexed that she had apparently forgotten it—the letter which had been such a solemn epoch in her young life. She coloured vividly and painfully.
“I mean—that is”—
Her husband looked another way. “You shall have these letters if you so much desire it.”