“Oh, uncle,” I said, “don’t.  I think they would rather we did not know any more.”

“You sweet woman child!” he exclaimed.  “You are right.  Your instinct is truer than mine.  I am only a man, after all!  I will never try to learn who it was that Esther loved.”

“I am very glad,” he added, “that this happened when your Aunt Sarah was away.  It would have been a great weariness and annoyance to her to have read these letters.”

Dear, courteous Uncle Jo!  I respected his chivalrous little artifice of speech, and tried to look as if I believed he would have carried the letters to his wife if she had been there.

“And I think, dear,” he hesitatingly proceeded, “we would better not speak of this.  It will be one sacred little secret that you and your old uncle will keep.  As no more letters will be found on the stairs, the whole thing will be soon forgotten.”

“Oh yes, uncle,” replied I; “of course it would be terrible to tell.  It isn’t our secret, you know; it is dear Esther Wynn’s.”

I do not know why it was that I locked up those four letters of Esther Wynn’s and did not look at them for many months.  I felt very guilty in keeping them; but a power I could not resist seemed to paralyze my very hand when I thought of opening the box in which they were.  At last, long after I had left Uncle Jo’s house, I took them out one day, and in the quiet and warmth of a summer noon I copied them slowly, carefully, word for word.  Then I hid the originals in my bosom, and walked alone, without telling any one whither I was going, to a wild spot I knew several miles away, where a little mountain stream came foaming and dashing down through a narrow gorge to empty itself into our broad and placid river.  I sat down on a mossy granite boulder, and slowly tore the letters into minutest fragments.  One by one I tossed the white and tiny shreds into the swift water, and watched them as far as I could see them.  The brook lifted them and tossed them over and over, lodged them in mossy crevices, or on tree roots, then swept them all up and whirled them away in dark depths of the current from which they would never more come to the surface.  It was a place which Esther would have loved, and I wondered, as I sat there hour after hour, whether it were really improbable, that she knew just then what I was doing for her.  I wondered, also, as I often before had wondered, if it might not have been by Esther’s will that the sacred hoard of letters, which had lain undiscovered for so many years, should fall at last into the hands of my tender and chivalrous Uncle Jo.  It was certainly a strange thing that on the stormy night which I have described, when we were discussing what should be done with the letters, both Uncle Jo and I at the same instant should have fancied we heard the words “Burn, burn!”

The following letter is the earliest one which I copied.  It is the one which Robert found so late at night and brought to us in the library:—­