P.S. If you should ever pass through Albany, we would like to have you drop in at the Dupont Hotel, where Arthur has taken a suite. The wedding is to-morrow morning in Greenford, and we leave Maine the same afternoon. U. B. Matthew tore the letter in bits and, putting it in the kitchen stove, set fire to the fragments. Then he drew down all the shades so that passers-by in the morning would think he had gone away for the day. He did not go upstairs as usual, but went into his mother's room, impelled by some blind, unconscious instinct of needing sympathy. He opened her closet door and put his hand gently on the faded gingham dresses and wrappers she had left behind her. Then, turning down her neat white counter-pane as he had seen her do a hundred times, he flung himself, still dressed, on her bed and, turning to her pillow for comfort, said with a choking voice and a deep-drawn breath, "Thank God, there's always mothers to fall back on!" It was such a little room, with one window and all his mother's humble but precious keepsakes on the bureau and dresser, that it soothed him, as he lay there alone until he had struggled with his first sorrow and overcome it. After all, he was but a boy of twenty-three, and he took trouble hard, like a child. Yes, naturally the affair was a seven days' wonder in Riverboro, but nobody ever knew the rights of it. They thought Matt had been a trifle reckless about his improvements, but then he was of marriageable age and could afford them, though he seemed to be terribly gloomy about them now they were all finished. They also thought he might be a little mite huffy about Undine Berry's taking up with an Albany man after "going" with him all summer, but that was nothing but guess-work and soon passed out of mind. The side of the affair that Matthew turned toward his mother can best be told by his own letter to her, which was the longest one he had ever written in his life. He posted it on Saturday night at Wareham, but started for Vermont twenty-four hours later to bring her home. "You keep house for me, Maria," he said with a forlorn attempt at gayety. "Mind you keep the improvements swept and dusted, and if the motor folks get too fresh, write a sign and hang it on the gate. Make it read: 'We intended this house to be green. If it looks too bright to suit you, drive by fast!'" RIVERBORO, Sept. 10th, 19-- To MRS. CYRUS MILLIKEN, Warsaw, Vermont DEAR MOTHER: I guess you suspicioned how it was with Undine and me when you offered to go and spend the summer with Lorenzo and his wife in Vermont, and I didn't say nothing to keep you home. It wa'n't that I didn't like to have you round, for I always did, and you know it, but the way I figured it out was, I was going to make so many improvements on the premises that you wouldn't hardly have a rest for the sole of your foot and you would be all fussed up till I got everything to rights.