He tried to fancy what it was going to do to the unbidden, resented guest. A queer protest against its enmity, an impulse to give her a square deal, surged up in him from nowhere. After all, whatever else she might be, she was Uncle Hugh's girl. Like all the world, Hugh loved the dispossessed lover. He knew what it felt like. One does not reach the mature age of twenty-four without having at least begun the passionate pilgrimage. His few tindery and tinselly affairs suspected of following the obvious formula: three parts curiosity, three parts the literary sense, three parts crude young impulse, one part distilled moonshine. The real love of his life had been Uncle Hugh. He sprang up with an abruptness to which his elders seemed to be used. He stopped before a brass-trimmed desk and jerked at the second drawer. "Where are those letters, sir?" "You mean--" "Yes, the one you wrote her about the money, and her answer. You put them with his papers, didn't you? Where's the key?" The older man drew from his waistcoat pocket a carved bit of brass. "What do you want with them?" he asked, cautiously. "I want to refresh my memory--and Aunt Maria's." He took out a neat little pile of papers and began to sort them intently. "Here they are on top." He laid out a docketed envelope on the desk. "And here are the essays and poems that you wouldn't publish. I considered them the best things he ever did." "You were not his literary executor," said his uncle, coldly. Another stifled glance passed between the seniors, but this time Miss Maria made no effort to restore the gloss of the surface. She sat idle, staring at the papers with a sort of horror. "Put them back," she said. "Winthrop, I do think you might burn them. If you keep things like that too long the wrong people are sure to get them." "Wait a bit. I haven't seen them for years, not since you published the collected works--with Hamlet left out." The young man lifted a worn brown-morocco portfolio tied with a frazzled red ribbon. "And here"--his voice dropped--"here is It--the letters he wrote to her and never sent. It was a sort of diary, wasn't it, going on for years? What a howling pity we couldn't print that!" "Hugh!" "Don't faint, Aunt Maria. You wouldn't catch me doing anything so indecent. But suppose Dante's dear family had suppressed the _Vita Nuova_. And it ought to be one of the most extraordinary human documents in the world, perfectly intimate, all the bars down, full of those flashes of his. Just the man, _ipsissimus_, that never happened but that once. Uncle Winthrop, don't you think that I might read it?" "Do you think so? I never did." "Oh, if you put it up to me like that! Of course I can't. But what luck that he didn't ask you to send it to her--supposing she's the wrong kind--wasn't it ..." His voice trailed off, leaving his lips foolishly open. "You don't mean--he did?" "Yes, at the end, after you had left the room," said Mr. Fowler, firmly.