She knocked over a chair with her broom, and left her sentence unfinished. Phœbe has always had a queer, clinging, superior sort of love for us both. She dandled us on her knees, and made all our rag-dolls, and carried us through measles and mumps and the rest. Then mother’s early death threw all the care upon her. I believe that in her secret heart she considers me more her child than her mistress. It cost a great many battles to become established as “Miss Mary.” “I should like to know,” she would say, throwing back her great, square shoulders and towering up in front of me,--“I should like to know if you s’pose I’m a goin’ to ‘Miss’ anybody that I’ve trotted to Bamberry Cross as many times as I have you, Mary Cabot! Catch me!” I remember how she would insist on calling me “her baby” after I was in long dresses, and that it mortified me cruelly once when Meta Tripp was here to tea with some Boston cousins. Poor, good Phœbe! Her rough love seems worth more to me, now that it is all I have left me in the world. It occurs to me that I may not have taken notice enough of her lately. She has done her honest best to comfort me, and she loved Roy, too. But about the letter. I wrapped my face up closely in the _crêpe_, so that, if I met Deacon Quirk, he should not recognize me, and, thinking that the air was pleasant as I walked, came home with the pork for Phœbe and a letter for myself. I did not open it; in fact, I forgot all about it, till I had been at home for half an hour. I cannot bear to open a letter since that morning when the lances of light fell on the snow. They have written to me from everywhere,--uncles and cousins and old school-friends; well-meaning people; saying each the same thing in the same way,--no, not that exactly, and very likely I should feel hurt and lonely if they did not write; but sometimes I wish it did not all have to be read. So I did not notice much about my letter this morning, till presently it occurred to me that what must be done had better be done quickly; so I drew up my chair to the desk, prepared to read and answer on the spot. Something about the writing and the signature rather pleased me: it was dated from Kansas, and was signed with the name of my mother’s youngest sister, Winifred Forceythe. I will lay the letter in between these two leaves, for it seems to suit the pleasant, spring-like day; besides, I took out the green book again on account of it. LAWRENCE, KANSAS, February 21. MY DEAR CHILD,--I have been thinking how happy you will be by and by because Roy is happy. And yet I know--I understand-- You have been in all my thoughts, and they have been such pitiful, tender thoughts, that I cannot help letting you know that somebody is sorry for you. For the rest, the heart knoweth its own, and I am, after all, too much of a stranger to my sister’s child to intermeddle.