"There's another photograph--the dark one! A white, little face looking out of the shadow; pensive this time, but always with those straight-glancing eyes. It's your own fault, Katrine! If you had been `taken' like ordinary folk, gazing blankly into space, all this might never have happened... The pensive portrait is even deadlier than the glad. It looks sorry for me. When I'm turning out at night leaving Will and Dorothea alone, it understands how I feel. Its eyes follow me to the door. "I haven't a photograph to send you; I wouldn't send one if I had. What's the use of a portrait of a big skeleton of a fellow, brown as a nigger, and at thirty-five looking a lot more like forty? Let that slide; but within the walls of the skeleton lives a lonely fellow who has no one left to send him letters from home, and who for the last three years has enjoyed his mail vicariously through extracts read from a young girl's letters. "You write wonderful letters, Katrine! I don't know if they are the sort a literary critic would approve, but they bring new life into our camp. Dorothea is generous in reading aloud all that she may, and I could stand a pretty stiff examination upon your life in that delightful little Cranford of a place, which you don't appreciate as you ought. Those letters, plus the photograph, have done the damage. "So this is what it comes to,--I want some letters for myself! I want (it sounds appallingly conceited; never mind! Let it go at that), I want you to know _me_, to realise my existence, even as I do yours. Will you write to me sometimes? I give you fair notice that in any case I mean to write to you. It can do you no harm to read my effusions, and if you do violence to your natural curiosity and burn them instead, the snub would miss its point, for I shall be no wiser. I'm not afraid that you will burn them. The feminine in you is too strongly developed for such a lack of curiosity, but will you answer them? That's the question! "Think it over, Katrine! At the moment of reading, you haven't a doubt of what you will say. Sit down at once to write that haughty letter of reproof and denial, but--don't send it off by the first post! Relieve yourself by letting off steam, and then think out the thing calmly. "Your own life is not all that you could wish, but compare it just for a moment with mine, and consider the compensations which you enjoy! Friends, books, papers, happenings of world-wide interest at your door, or what _seems_ your door to exiles across the world--all these, and into the bargain, home, and comfort, and _cool_! You must acknowledge, Katrine, that the odds are on your side! "If I could take a holiday and come home, you would receive me graciously as Dorothea's friend. Why should it require a greater effort to receive me in the spirit?