Mary hastened round the table, and found her friend with a letter in her hand.
'Well,' said Mary, 'that is one of your letters to Dick, is it not?'
'Yes,' answered Nell tragically; 'but fancy his keeping my letters lying about carelessly in a drawer—and—and, yes, using them as scribbling paper!'
Scrawled across the envelopes in a barely decipherable handwriting were such notes as these: 'Schoolboys smoking master's cane-chair, work up'; 'Return of the swallows (poetic or humorous?)'; 'My First Murder (magazine?)'; 'Better do something pathetic for a change.'
There were tears in Nell's eyes.
'This comes of prying,' said Mary.
'Oh, I wasn't prying,' said Nell; 'I only opened it by accident. That is the worst of it. I can't say anything about them to him, because he might think I had opened his drawer to—to see what was in it—which is the last thing in the world I would think of doing. Oh, Mary,' she added woefully, 'what do you think?'
'I think you are a goose,' said Mary promptly.
'Ah, you are so indifferent,' Nell said, surrendering her position all at once. 'Now when I see a drawer I am quite unhappy until I know what is in it, especially if it is locked. When we lived opposite the Burtons I was miserable because they always kept the blind of one of their windows down. If I had been a boy I would have climbed up to see why they did it. Ah! that is Dick; I know his step.'
She was hastening to the door, when she remembered the letters, and subsided primly into a chair.