"Very well," said the doctor, "I'll get them for you."
He went to a filing cabinet and took out a package of papers and came back across the room with two sheets of paper which he handed to Hayward, and watched him as he read them.
The first was as sweet and gentle and loving a letter as the heart of man could desire. Some of the references in it were a little bit obscure and inaccurate, but Hayward was too much elated with the tender, petting things it said to notice trifles so inconsequential. He revelled in it like a hungry man at a feast. He gulped down its sweetness ravenously: and took the second. What! The first sentence was the jab of a misshapen barb—and every following sentence a twisting of that barb in the flesh.
"My God, this is awful!" he groaned. "I am sorry you gave it to me. Have you no other like the first?"
"No," said the doctor. "All her other writings have been mere scraps or incoherent mixtures of such things as are in the first letter you have there with such as are in the one you have just read. These are the only ones in each of which her mood was fixed and distinct."
Hayward took the first letter and read it over again as hungrily as at first.
"In which mood does she seem most to be?" he asked.
"In the mood to write that first letter, fortunately; but the case is peculiar in that very fact. I have studied it with—"
"Let me see her," Hayward broke in. "May I see her? I must see her!"
"I would advise against it," the doctor said, in a tone and manner that was intended to be a polite refusal of permission.