“Oh,” groaned Uncle Jo, after reading one of the most glowing letters, “oh, was there really ever in any other man’s arms but mine a woman who could say such things as these between kisses?  O Nell, Nell, thank God that you haven’t the dower of such a double fire in your veins as Esther had!”

All night we sat reading, and reading, and reading.  When the great clock in the hall struck six, we started like guilty persons.

“Oh, my childie,” said Uncle Jo, “how wrong this has been in me!  Poor little pale face, go to bed now, and remember, I forbid you to go to school to-day; and I forbid your getting up until noon.  I promise you I will not look at another letter.  I will lock them all up till to-morrow evening, and then we will finish them.”

I obeyed him silently.  I was too exhausted to speak; but I was also too excited to sleep.  Until noon I lay wide awake on the bed, in my darkened room, living over Esther Wynn’s life, marvelling at the inexplicable revelation of it which had been put into our hands, and wondering, until the uncertainty seemed almost anguish, what was that end which we could never know.  Did she die in the Holy Land? or did she come home well and strong? and did her lover die some day, leaving his secret treasure of letters behind him, and poor stricken Esther to go to her grave in fear lest unfriendly hands might have gained possession of her heart’s records?  He was a married man we felt sure.  Had the wife whom he did not love paced up and down and up and down for years over these dumb witnesses to that of which she had never dreamed?  The man himself, when he came to die, did he writhe, thinking of those silent, eloquent, precious letters which he must leave to time and chance to destroy or protect?  Did men carry him, dead, down the very stairs on which he had so often knelt unseen and wafted kisses towards the hidden Esther?

All these conjectures and questions, and thousands more, hurried in wild confusion through my brain.  In vain I closed my eyes, in vain I pressed my hands on my eyelids; countless faces, dark, light, beautiful, plain, happy, sad, threatening, imploring, seemed dancing in the air around my bed, and saying, “Esther, Esther!”

We knew she was fair; for there was in one of the letters a tiny curl of pale brown hair; but we believed from many expressions of hers that she had no beauty.  Oh, if I could but have known how she looked!

At last I fell asleep, and slept heavily until after dark.  This refreshed my overwrought nerves, and when at nine o’clock in the evening I joined my uncle in the library, I was calmer than he.

We said very few words.  I sat on his knee, with one arm around his neck, and hand in hand we reverently lifted the frail, trembling sheets.

We learned nothing new; in fact, almost any one of the letters was a rounded revelation of Esther’s nature, and of the great love she bore—­and there was little more to learn.  There were more than a hundred of the letters, and they embraced a period of fifteen years.  We arranged them in piles, each year by itself; for some years there were only two or three; we wondered whether during those years they had lived near each other, and so had not written, or whether the letters had been destroyed.  When the last letter was laid where it belonged, we looked at each other in silence, and we both sighed.