I know if you were here you would give me a piece of your mind. So would Keefe. So would Annie Laurie. Actually I am glad none of you is here. Mercy me, how you would scold me! It has occurred to me during the last minute and a half that I haven’t been treating my tremendously nice little hostess very well. And how good she has been to me! I am going to reform. I shall ask her if she’ll not go walking—she loves to walk—and I shall suggest visiting old Mrs. Treadway, whom Miss Ravanel likes to look after. Carin, forgive me for being such a dolorous creature. And you so happy, too! I wanted to do something for you, and I go and throw cold water on your sparkling day with a sighing, moaning letter. Shame on me. _I love you_, _Azalea_. * * * * * Monrepos, February 1st. _Carin girl_: So you are to be at Lee for the spring vacation. What fun! Of course I shall try to get there. I feel as if I must see you. And do you really mean to tell me that you want me to go to Europe with you, Carin? How wonderful that would be. But I couldn’t, could I? If I go at all I must go with Uncle David and Aunt Lorena. So that’s settled. What do you think Miss Ravanel and I have been doing? Making dresses. She needed some and there didn’t seem to be anybody at hand to make them, and so I said to please let me try. At first she thought I would make a botch of them. But not at all. Mother McBirney taught me to be very particular, and I have a sort of a “touch” as you and Annie Laurie always said. The dresses, which are for spring, are really very nice. She said she never had any that really suited her so well. While we sewed, she told me many things about her life. I was quite right; she did love my Uncle David when she was a girl and he was a young man, but when Aunt Lorena came back from boarding school, he fell terribly in love with her and went to Miss Ravanel and told her, and she bade him do whatever his heart prompted. “You’re not going to hate me, are you, Delight?” he asked her. “Hate you?” she said. “Why should I hate you? I want you to be very happy and mean to be happy myself.” “You will marry someone much more worthy of you than I am,” he assured her. She said that was as might be. She hoped she would love someone again. But she never did, Carin. All of her life she has had to see her kin leaving her, either to go to some other part of the country, or into the family vault, and never once has she met anyone she could care for. But she says she has been quite happy after all.