I asked Bill—don't know his other name—to take me over the house, as I thought you would wish me to see the improvements. It is not quite so quaint and home-like as it used to be, but much more convenient. Screening the piazza is a great help in keeping out mosquitoes, but yours is a trifle small, and Bill thinks the wire netting makes it look like a hen-coop. Perhaps it does, but I believe you'll get a great deal of comfort from it.
I am kind of sorry you bricked up the sitting-room fireplace and put in a Franklin stove, for the open fire used to look so cozy last April, do you remember? The wallpapers are very handsome, and how your mother will enjoy the new stove and the pump in the kitchen sink! As for the electric lights, I can fancy how any one will appreciate them who has filled lamps and cleaned chimneys all her life.
I am mentioning every little thing to show you how carefully I looked about, for I want you to feel my interest in it all, even though I am not going to live there, as we thought possibly at one time I might. I have told Arthur that you were the best friend I had in Riverboro, and I should have become homesick and bored to death if it had not been for your kind little attentions. I have said no more about you to him, as, like all true lovers, he is inclined to be just a little jealous! With remembrances to your mother, and with the compliments of the season, I am your sincere friend and well-wisher,
UNDINE BERRY.
P.S. If you should ever pass through Albany, we would like to have you drop in at the Dupont Hotel, where Arthur has taken a suite. The wedding is to-morrow morning in Greenford, and we leave Maine the same afternoon.
U. B.
Matthew tore the letter in bits and, putting it in the kitchen stove, set fire to the fragments. Then he drew down all the shades so that passers-by in the morning would think he had gone away for the day. He did not go upstairs as usual, but went into his mother's room, impelled by some blind, unconscious instinct of needing sympathy. He opened her closet door and put his hand gently on the faded gingham dresses and wrappers she had left behind her. Then, turning down her neat white counter-pane as he had seen her do a hundred times, he flung himself, still dressed, on her bed and, turning to her pillow for comfort, said with a choking voice and a deep-drawn breath,
"Thank God, there's always mothers to fall back on!"
It was such a little room, with one window and all his mother's humble but precious keepsakes on the bureau and dresser, that it soothed him, as he lay there alone until he had struggled with his first sorrow and overcome it. After all, he was but a boy of twenty-three, and he took trouble hard, like a child.
Yes, naturally the affair was a seven days' wonder in Riverboro, but nobody ever knew the rights of it. They thought Matt had been a trifle reckless about his improvements, but then he was of marriageable age and could afford them, though he seemed to be terribly gloomy about them now they were all finished.