Generally she liked to be slow about preparing and eating her meals, for in this way they took up quite a part of the long, lonely day; but to-night she was in such a hurry about her few preparations and did everything with such an air of abstraction that she nearly amputated a finger while cutting bread, and entirety forgot to put anything in the tea-pot except hot water. When at last the dishes had been washed and carefully put away, each in its own proper place, when the sleek white cat had been given a generous saucer of milk, then Miss Hicks, with an air of trembling and hesitating eagerness, placed a chair against the old-fashioned cupboard in the living-room, and reaching up, to the peril of life and limb, drew forth from its inmost recesses a square pasteboard box. She carefully wiped off the dust on its surface--it was probably the only dusty article in her whole establishment--and, carrying the box to the kitchen table, deposited it there with a loving little pat. But now, when her intentions seemed practically accomplished, something held her back; it seemed an though invisible fingers were closing over her own to keep her from opening the box, from prying into the things which she had not had the courage to look at for such long, long years. She thought, with a shiver, of these years. Fifteen of them! And so clear does memory sometimes become that Miss Hicks could distinctly remember when she had placed the last letter in the box--her "Treasure Box" she had often called it lovingly--and as she thought of all that had happened since she had put that letter in, of all the loneliness and desolation of those fifteen years, she bent her head on the little green box and cried softly. After a while she raised her head, and with a quick flash of determination in her grey eyes, took the lid from the box and turned the contents out on the table. On top of the heap lay several yellowed envelopes, quaintly embossed, with "Miss Mary Ellen Hicks" written on them in faded, boyish writing. With a caressing touch Miss Hicks put these aside and picked up a bent tintype of a boy with laughing eyes and a tender, pleasant mouth. At this she looked a long time, at first with a little answering smile for the smile in the picture, then with misty reminiscent eyes. More modern valentines came next in the pile; much more elaborate, too, these were, and the verses seemed chosen by a more discriminating eye. She put them all aside, with a sigh and a loving look for each, and picked up the one at the very bottom; the envelope bore a western postmark and was not elaborate nor fanciful as the others had been, nor were the contents anything more than a sheet of paper folded around the picture of a man--a man who, in spite of the lines of weariness in his face, had still the boyish eyes and kind mouth of the other picture. On the paper was written, in a strong, angular hand: