Still, even so and when you come right down to it, was there anything so terrible about her writing a celebrity like that and asking for his picture, if that was all she had done. But was it? Those long-enveloped gray letters he had found in the fireplace that morning, after that day in which he had seen her in the car (or thought he had)—or at least traces of them. And the queer way she had looked at him when he brought them up in connection with that closed car in Bergley Place. She had squinted her eyes as if to think, and had then laughed rather shakily when he charged her with receiving letters from Raskoffsky, and with his having come here to see her. His finding them had been entirely by accident. He always got up early to “start things,” for Beryl was a sleepyhead, and he would start the fire in the grate and put on the water to boil in the kitchen. And this morning as he was bending over the grate to push away some scraps of burnt wood so as to start a new fire, he came across five or six letters, or the ashes of them, all close together as though they might have been tied with a ribbon or something. What was left of them looked as though they had been written on heavy stationery such as a man of means might use, the envelopes long and thick. The top one still showed the address—“Mrs. Beryl Stoddard, Care of ——” He was bending over to see the rest when a piece of wood toppled over and destroyed it. He rescued one little scrap, the half-charred corner of one page, and the writing on this seemed to be like that on Raskoffsky’s picture, or so he thought, and he read: “to see you.” Just that and nothing more, part of a sentence that ended the page and went to the next. And that page was gone, of course! But it was funny wasn’t it, that at sight of them the thought of Raskoffsky should have come to him? And that ride in the park. Come to think of it, the man in the car had looked a little like Raskoffsky’s picture. And for all he knew, Raskoffsky might have then been in town—returned for this especial purpose,—and she might have been meeting him on the sly. Of course. At the Deming. That was it. He had never been quite able to believe her. All the circumstances at the time pointed to something of the kind, even if he had never been able to tie them together and make her confess to the truth of them.