Nor had he ceased to remember the other letters which followed, and how true a story they told of Lucy's daily life and ambitions.

He could almost recall the wording of one of them.

"My husband is too ill," it had said, "to go south with me, and so I will run down to Rome for a month or so, for I really need the change." And a later one, written since his death, in which she wrote of her winter in Paris and at Monte Carlo, and "how good my mother-in-law is to take care of Ellen." This last letter to her sister, just received--the one he then held in his hand, and which gave Jane such joy, and which he was then reading as carefully as if it had been a prescription--was to his analytical mind like all the rest of its predecessors.

One sentence sent a slight curl to his lips.

"I cannot stay away any longer from my precious sister," it said, "and am coming back to the home I adore.