Miss Pinckney sighed.

“He kept all her letters,” said she, “and they came back to her after he was killed. He was killed here in Charleston, at Fort Sumter, in the war; they brought him across here and carried him on a stretcher and she—well, well, it’s all done with and let it rest, but it is strange that those letters should have fallen into your hands.”

“Why, strange?” 150

150

“Why?” burst out Miss Pinckney. “Why I have dusted that old bureau inside and out a hundred times, and pulled out the drawers and pushed them in and it never shewed sign of having anything in it but emptiness, and you don’t do more’n look at it and you find those letters. It’s just as if the thing had deceived me. I don’t mind, and I don’t want to see them, they weren’t intended for other eyes than his and hers—and maybe yours since they were shewn you like that.”

“Was it wrong of me to look at them?” asked Phyl. “I never would have done it only—only—Oh, I don’t know, I somehow felt she wouldn’t mind. She seemed like a sister—I would never dream of looking at another person’s letters but she did not seem like another person. I can’t explain. It was just as though the letters were my own—just exactly as though they were my own when I found them in my hands.”

Phyl was talking with her eyes fixed before her as though she were looking across some great distance.

Miss Pinckney gave a little shiver, then supper being over she rose from the table and led the way from the room.

Richard Pinckney had dined with them but he was out for supper somewhere or another. They went to the drawing-room and had not been there for more than a few minutes when Frances Rhett was announced.

The Rhetts were on intimate enough terms with the Pinckneys to call in like this without ceremony; 151 Frances had called to speak to Miss Pinckney about some charity affair she was getting up in a hurry, but she had not been five minutes in the room before Phyl knew that she had called to look at her. To look at the girl who had come to live with the Pinckneys, the red headed girl. Phyl did not know that girls of Frances’ type dread red haired girls, if they are pretty, as rabbits dread stoats, but she did know in some uncanny way that Frances Rhett considered Richard Pinckney as her own property to be protected against all comers.

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