For a few weeks I abandoned myself to her healing attentions. Then I set myself resolutely to find work both for hands and mind. My mother was not without influential friends. As I have said, my fortunes were somewhat nipped by my father's untimely death, but our family and associations were among the best. We had a relative in power at Washington. To him I applied for a clerkship, and received, in answer, the situation I was filling, at the time when that dead-letter came so strangely into my hands. It may be thought improbable that I should abandon the profession for which I had studied with so much zeal. But, the very memory of that zeal, and of the hopes which had stimulated it, now gave me a dislike to the law. I required both change of scene and of pursuits. The blow dealt at my heart had stunned my ambition, also. To one of my temperament, aspirations, acquisitiveness, all the minor passions and pursuits of life are but steps leading up the hillside to the rose-crowned summit, where love sits smiling under the eye of heaven. And I, being for the time at least, blasted prematurely, was no more myself, but was to myself like a stranger within my own sanctuary. I went into the dead-letter office, and commenced my routine of breaking seals and registering contents, as if I had been born for that business. I was a rapid worker, quiet, and well-thought-of by my associates, who deemed me a little cold and skeptical, a trifle reserved, very steady for so young a fellow, and an efficient clerk who thoroughly earned his salary. That was all they knew of Richard Redfield. And in those days I did not know much more about myself. The months had worn away, one after the other, with a dreary coldness. In the summer I struggled through the suffocating dust; in the winter I picked my way through the disgusting mud, to and fro, from my lodgings to the office buildings; that was about all the change which the seasons brought to me, whom once the smell of spring violets filled with pungent delight, and the odor of June roses made happy as a god on Olympus. Half the night I sat brooding over that brief revelation, so precious to me, yet so loathsome. The longer I pondered its words the less vivid grew my hope of making any triumphant use of it for the detection of the two guilty persons--the one who wrote it, and the one to whom it was addressed. I might lay it before Mr. Argyll, but he might not feel, as I did, that it had any connection with the murder, neither was there anything to prove but that the missive might have been directed to _me_. Indeed, Mr. Argyll might well inquire how I could pretend that it should have reached me through the routine of the dead-letter department, after all this stretch of time--very nearly two years!