It was only from one note that we discovered her last name.  This was written in the early days of her acquaintance with her lover, and while she was apparently little more than a child.  It was evident that at first the relation was more like one of pupil and master.  For some time the letters all commenced scrupulously “my dear friend,” or “my most beloved friend.”  It was not until years had passed that the master became the lover; we fancied, Uncle Jo and I, as we went reverently over the beautiful pages, that Esther had grown and developed more and more, until she was the teacher, the helper, the inspirer.  We felt sure, though we could not tell how, that she was the stronger of the two; that she moved and lived habitually on a higher plane; that she yearned often to lift the man she loved to the freer heights on which her soul led its glorified existence.

It was strange how little we gathered which could give a clew to her actual history or to his.  The letters almost never gave the name of the place, only the day and year, many of them only the day.  There was dearth of allusions to persons; it was as if these two had lived in a separate world of their own.  When persons were mentioned at all, it was only by initials.  It was plain that some cruel, inexorable bar separated her from the man she loved; a bar never spoken of—­whose nature we could only guess,—­but one which her strong and pure nature felt itself free to triumph over in spirit, however submissive the external life might seem.

Their relation had lasted for many years; so many, that that fact alone seemed a holy seal and testimony to the purity and immortality of the bond which united them.  Esther must have been a middle-aged woman when, as the saddened letters revealed, her health failed and she was ordered by the physicians to go to Europe.  The first letter which my uncle had read, the one which Princess found, was the letter in which she bade farewell to her lover.  There was no record after that; only two letters which had come from abroad; one was the one that I have mentioned, which contained the pomegranate blossom from Jaffa, and a little poem which, after long hours of labor, Uncle Jo and I succeeded in deciphering.  The other had two flowers in it—­an Edelweiss which looked as white and pure and immortal as if it had come from Alpine snows only the day before; and a little crimson flower of the amaranth species, which was wrapped by itself, and marked “From Bethlehem of Judea.”  The only other words in this letter were, “I am better, darling, but I cannot write yet.”

It was evident that there had been the deepest intellectual sympathy between them.  Closely and fervently and passionately as their hearts must have loved, the letters were never, from first to last, simply lovers’ letters.  Keen interchange of comment and analysis, full revelation of strongly marked individual life, constant mutual stimulus to mental growth there must have been between these two.  We were inclined to think, from the exquisitely phrased sentences and rare fancies in the letters, and from the graceful movement of some of the little poems, that Esther must have had ambition as a writer.  Then, again, she seemed so wholly, simply, passionately, a woman, to love and be loved, that all thought of anything else in her nature or her life seemed incongruous.