You must brace up. If you can’t do that try a belt. Life is too short to spend in bed. My motto has always been “Spend freely everywhere else.” At present I recommend anything calculated to mend you. I may in all modesty mention that just before Christmas I shall be traveling north and shall then adore to stop and cheer you up a bit if you invite me. I have made it an invariable rule, however, not to stay over night anywhere when I am not invited, so I hope you will consider my feelings and send me an invitation. My eyes fill as I think what it will be to sit beside you and recall dear old New York. It will be the next best thing to being run over by an automobile, won’t it? Yours, with fondest recollections, HERBERT KENDRICK MITCHELL. Aunt Mary laid the letter down. “Lucinda,” she said in a curiously veiled tone, “give me a handkerchief—a big one. As big a one as I’ve got.” Lucinda did as requested. “Now, go away,” said Aunt Mary. Lucinda went away. She went straight to Joshua. “She’s had a letter an’ read it an’ it’s made her cry,” she said. “That’s better’n if it made her mad,” said Joshua, who was warming his hands at the stove. “I ain’t sure that it won’t make her mad later,” said Lucinda. “Say, but she is a Tartar since she came back. Seems some days’s if I couldn’t live.” “You’ll live,” said Joshua, and, as his hands were now well-warmed, he went out again. After a while Aunt Mary’s bell jangled violently and Lucinda had to hurry back. “Lucinda, did the doctor say anythin’ to you about how long he thought I might be sick?” “Yes, he did.” “What did he say? I want to know jus’ what he said. Speak up!” “He said he didn’t have no idea how long you’d be sick.” Aunt Mary threw a look at Lucinda that ought to have annihilated her. “I want to see Jack,” she said. “Bring my writin’ desk. Right off. Quick.” She wrote to Jack, and he came up and spent the next Sunday with her, cheering her mightily. “I wish the others could have come, too,” she said once an hour all through his visit. Mitchell’s letter seemed to have bred a tremendous longing within her. “They’ll come later,” said Jack, with hearty good-will. “They all want to come.” “I don’t know how we could ever have any fun up here though,” said his aunt sadly. “My heavens alive, Jack,—but this is an awful place to live in. And to think that I lived to be seventy before I found it out.” Jack took her hand and kissed it. He did sympathize, even if he was only twenty-two and longing unutterably to be somewhere else and kissing someone else at that very minute. “Mitchell wrote me a letter,” continued Aunt Mary. “He said he was comin’. Well, dear me, he can eat mince pie and drive with Joshua when he goes for the mail, but I don’t know what else I can do with him. Oh, if I’d only been born in the city!” Jack kissed her hand again. He didn’t know what to say. Aunt Mary’s lot seemed to border upon the tragic just then and there.