DEAR FRANK,—I have just heard that you are in New York—that you have been here some time. Why did you never come to see me? It was not kind. And didn’t you know that your mother has been heartbroken over your disappearance? Jerry and Jack knew you were somewhere in this country, but they’ve kept your mother in the dark. What does it all mean? Come to tea with me—just me—on Friday afternoon at five, and tell me all about it. Your affectionate ANNETTE. As this was the first bit of connection with my own family since Jerry had practically kicked me down his steps, I was deeply perturbed by it. I am not without natural affection, and yet I seemed to have died to the old life as completely as Lovey to that with his daughters. I had never forgotten Jerry’s words: “And now get out. Don’t let any of us ever see your face or hear your name again.” The very fact that he was justified had roused the foolish remnant of my pride. I had loved my mother; I had reverenced my father; though my brothers were indifferent to me, I had felt a genuine tenderness for my sisters. But since that night on Jerry’s steps it had been to me as if I had put myself on one side of a flood and left them on the other, and that there was no magic skiff that would carry me back whence I came. I cannot say that I grieved for them; and it was the last of my thoughts that they would grieve for me. I accepted the condition that we were dead to each other, and tried to bury memory. And now came this first stirring of resurrection. It hurt me. I didn’t want it. It was like the return of life to a frozen limb. Numbness was preferable to anguish. “Lovey,” I said, as the old man hung about me when I was undressing that night, “how would you feel if one of your daughters—” He raised himself from the task of pulling off my boots, which to humor him I allowed him to perform, and looked at me in terror. “They ain’t—they ain’t after me?” “No, no! But suppose they were—wouldn’t you like to see them?” He dropped the boot he held in his hand. “Y’ain’t goin’ to ’ave them ’unted up for me, Slim?” “I don’t know anything about them, Lovey. That isn’t my point at all. But suppose—just suppose—you could see them again; would you do it?” He shook his bald head. “They’re dead to me. I’m dead to them. If we was to see each other now ’twouldn’t be nothink but diggin’ up a corpse.” “Nothink but diggin’ up a corpse,” I repeated to myself as I turned east from Fifth Avenue, leaving the brown trees of the Park behind me, and took the few steps necessary to reach my uncle Van Elstine’s door. He had married my mother’s sister, and during the lifetime of my aunt the families had been fairly intimate. Of late years they had drifted apart, as families will, though touch-and-go relations were still maintained.