All day, dear, I go about my duties with a most ladylike absence of passion, but when night comes I cross the sandy waste of the past and stretch out my hands to fondle the idea of perfect companionship. Our thoughts seem to be a reverberation of the same thunderous roll, and while they are not identical, they are of the same breadth and elevation. The conditions of propinquity are responsible; and as love did not come to me, I had to do as Mahomet did with the mountain. When he goes from me, Joy vanishes, but leaves a bright track of light behind, which bursts upon me through the clouds of cigarette smoke that he has left. Each day I awaken more warmed and thrilled, like the sun which finds the mountain tops that he touched with his departing rays still warm when he sends his shaft of light in the morn. No maelstrom of distrust do we feel, only a mighty, overpowering passion that no undress of intimacy can ever destroy. Good-night, friend of my babyhood, my girlhood, my womanhood. My greetings for your birthday. Affy, MARIANNE. February 10. Don't be cross with me, dear, I am in no danger. Your repeated letters came--I read them, then straightway forgot that they should be answered. It is no evidence of a lessening of my love for you, but because life has become so mysteriously perfect for me that I dream away my hours. One night, seemingly a million years ago, but really only within the present week, I felt cold as I stood by my stove and plaited my hair--I have nice hair, Lorna, haven't I? But I didn't seem to notice it. I was in my nightie and I shivered. My white chiffon bedspread with the pink roses strewn over it was near, so I drew it close about me and felt that I had protected myself from the chill. It wasn't an external chill that made me quake, but something old and deep-rooted and lonely that came from the depths of the soul in me and begged and pleaded for recognition. The big stove with its dozens of mica eyes threw out comforting little rays of coziness, but the real me still shivered. I walked to the window and opened it. Strange, disquieting, but gracious thoughts that I had lost somewhere in the twilight of the night before, came riding back to me on a snow flurry--it was so still that I feared to breathe, lest I disturb the solitude--the sky wasn't heavy and gray, but clear and blue and seemed like a soft silken canopy that the gaunt maples upheld to protect me and my love, and the virgin snow that fell on my outstretched arms in soft little rosettes that disappeared as our loves sometimes do when they have but let us feel the deliciousness of their possession. The heavy old door between my room and his creaked with rustiness and age, as for the first time in years it turned upon its hinges. Carlton had watched for my last good-night signal and grew alarmed at its absence and my quietude.