Some of the letters were creased, as if they had once been much folded, perhaps for slipping into secret hiding-places, but none of them bore any address or a date.

"To my beloved," was sometimes written on the cover, and inside he was darling or beloved again.

So no one could have arranged them in the order in which they were written, though there was a three-cornered one which said it was the first.

There was a violet in it, clinging to the paper as if they were fond of each other, and Grizel's mamma had written, "The violet is me, hiding in a corner because I am so happy." The letters were in many moods, playful, reflective, sad, despairing, arch, but all were written in an ecstasy of the purest love, and most of them were cheerful, so that you seemed to see the sun dancing on the paper while she wrote, the same sun that afterwards showed up her painted cheeks.

Why they came back to her no one ever discovered, any more than how she who slipped the violet into that three-cornered one and took it out to kiss again and wrote, "It is my first love-letter, and I love it so much I am reluctant to let it go," became in a few years the derision of the Double Dykes.