Andora moaned, “Don’t you feel _anything at all?_” as the socks landed in her hollow bosom; but Lizzie, intent upon her task, tranquilly continued to unfold and sort. She felt a great deal as she did so, but her feelings were too deep and delicate for the simplifying process of speech. She only knew that each article she drew from the trunks sent through her the long tremor of Deering’s touch. It was part of her wonderful new life that everything belonging to him contained an infinitesimal fraction of himself--a fraction becoming visible in the warmth of her love as certain secret elements become visible in rare intensities of temperature. And in the case of the objects before her, poor shabby witnesses of his days of failure, what they gave out acquired a special poignancy from its contrast to his present cherished state. His shirts were all in round dozens now, and washed as carefully as old lace. As for his socks, she knew the pattern of every pair, and would have liked to see the washerwoman who dared to mislay one, or bring it home with the colors “run”! And in these homely tokens of his well-being she saw the symbol of what her tenderness had brought him. He was safe in it, encompassed by it, morally and materially, and she defied the embattled powers of malice to reach him through the armor of her love. Such feelings, however, were not communicable, even had one desired to express them: they were no more to be distinguished from the sense of life itself than bees from the lime-blossoms in which they murmur. “Oh, do _look_ at him, Lizzie! He’s found out how to open the bag!” Lizzie lifted her head to smile a moment at her son, who sat throned on a heap of studio rubbish, with Andora before him on adoring knees. She thought vaguely, “Poor Andora!” and then resumed the discouraged inspection of a buttonless white waistcoat. The next sound she was aware of was a fluttered exclamation from her friend. “Why, Lizzie, do you know what he used the bag for? To keep your letters in!” Lizzie looked up more quickly. She was aware that Andora’s pronoun had changed its object, and was now applied to Deering. And it struck her as odd, and slightly disagreeable, that a letter of hers should be found among the rubbish abandoned in her husband’s New York lodgings. “How funny! Give it to me, please.” “Give the bag to Aunt Andora, darling! Here--look inside, and see what else a big big boy can find there! Yes, here’s another! Why, why--” Lizzie rose with a shade of impatience and crossed the floor to the romping group beside the other trunk. “What is it? Give me the letters, please.” As she spoke, she suddenly recalled the day when, in Mme. Clopin’s _pension_, she had addressed a similar behest to Andora Macy. Andora had lifted a look of startled conjecture. “Why, this one’s never been opened! Do you suppose that awful woman could have kept it from him?”