Mary was lying in her long chair under the lamp.  She had a cushion under her head, and her hand shaded her eyes.  “Did—­Mr. Knox have anything to do with it?”

“What makes you ask that, Mary?”

“Did he?”

“Well, yes.  You know what I told you; he thinks I’d be—­wasted.”

“On Dick?”

“Yes.”

Mary lay for a long time with her hand over her eyes; then she said:  “If you don’t marry Dick, what about your future, Nannie?”

“There’s time enough to think about that.  And—­and I can wait.”

“For what?”

Nannie blushed and laughed a little.  “Prince Charming.”

After that there was a silence, out of which Nannie asked:  “Does your head ache, Mary?”

“A little.”

“Can’t I get you something?”

“No.  After I’ve rested a bit I’ll take a walk.”

Mary’s walk led her by the lighted shop windows.  The air was keen and cold and helped her head.  But it did not help her heart.  She had a sense of suffocation when she thought of Nannie.

She stopped in front of one of the shops.  There were dolls in the window, charming, round-eyed, ringleted.  One of them was especially captivating, with fat blond curls, fat legs, blue silk socks and slippers, crisp frills and a broad blue hat.

“How I should have loved her when I was a little girl,” was Mary’s thought as she stood looking in.  Then:  “How a child of my own would have loved her.”

She made up her mind that she would buy the doll—­in the morning when the shop opened.  It was a whimsical thing to do, to give herself a doll at her time of life.  But it would be in a sense symbolic.  She had no child to which to give it; she would give it to the child who was once herself.

She came home with a lighter heart and with the knowledge of what she had to do.  She put on her blue house coat and sat down to her desk with its embossed leather fittings, and there under the lovely, lamp which Kingdon Knox had given her she wrote to Nannie.

She gave the letter to Nannie the next morning.  “I want you to read it when you are all alone.  Then tear it up.  It must always be just between you and me, Nannie.”

Nannie read the letter in the lunch hour.  She got her lunch at a cafeteria and there was a rest room.  It was very quiet and she had a corner to herself.  She wondered what Mary had to say to her, and why she didn’t talk it out instead of writing about it.

But Mary had felt that she could not trust herself to speak.  There would have been Nannie’s eyes to meet, questions to answer; and this meant so much.  Paper and pen were impersonal.