That was Friday and the letter came the following Tuesday. Linda, alone at the breakfast-table, instantly aware of the source of the square envelope addressed in a delicate regular writing, opened it and read in an unusual mental disturbance: “My dear Linda, I hope you will not consider it peculiar for me to call you this, for nothing else seems possible. Meeting you in that abrupt manner upset me, as you must have noticed. Of course I knew of you, and even now I can not go into our long unhappy affair, but until I saw you, and so remarkably like the Lowries, I did not realize how wicked Elouise and I had been. But I am obliged to add only where you were concerned. We have no desire to be ambiguous in that. However, I am writing to say that we should love to have you visit us here. It is possible under the circumstances that your mother will not wish you to come. Yet I know the Lowries, a very independent and decided family, and although it is my last intention to be the cause of difficulty with your mother, still I hope it may be arranged. In closing I must add how happy I was at the evidence of your blood. But that, I now see, was a certainty. You will have to forgive us for a large measure of blindness. Affectionately, AMELIA VIGNÉ LOWRIE.” Almost instantaneously Linda was aware that she would visit the Lowries. She liked the letter extremely, as well as all that she remembered of its sender. At the same time she prepared for a scene with her mother, different from those of the past--with the recourse to the brandy flask--but no less unpleasant. They had very little to say to each other now; and, when she went into her mother's room with an evident definite purpose, the latter showed a constrained surprise, a palpable annoyance that her daughter had found her at the daily renovation of her worn face. XVIII Linda said directly, “I met Miss Lowrie, father's sister, at a concert last week, and this morning I had a letter asking me to stay with them in Philadelphia.” Mrs. Feldt's face suddenly had no need for the color she held poised on a cloth. Her voice, sharp at the beginning, rose to a shrill unrestrained wrath. “I wonder at the brass of her speaking to you at all let alone writing here. Just you give me the letter and I'll shut her up. The idea! I hope you were cool to her, the way they treated us. Stay with them--I guess not!” “But I thought of going,” Linda replied. “It's only natural. After all, you must see that he was my father.”