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98 promised he would not tell Alec a word about our business transactions.

I enjoyed the copying. Dr. Maynard's mother must have been a perfectly lovely woman. She used to write to her son every Sunday, and oh, such sweet companionable little notes—all about what was going on in the town, and always at the end just a sentence or two about honour and ideals, and how she believed in her son and missed him. If Oliver had had a mother to write to him like that—to tell him how she wanted him to grow up in the image of his honoured father who had died, who rejoiced at every success he had, who sympathised at every failure—if Oliver had had a mother to write him letters every Sunday evening by the firelight, I don't believe he would have ever gotten into such a difficulty. I wondered if mothers wrote letters like these to their daughters. Of course they must.

Every once in a while, I would run across a reference to my own mother (for Mrs. Maynard was her neighbour) and, really, it was a little like seeing her for just a minute.

I know I'm neglecting my story, but I must tell about one special letter of Mrs. Maynard's, because it referred to me. It didn't happen to be written to her son but to a woman friend whom I didn't know. It was a chatty letter, that related all the important events and happenings in the town, very long and full of the littlest details you can imagine. It was on the fourth thin sheet that I ran across this: "And our dear neighbour Mrs. Vars has a little daughter three weeks old," I deciphered. "She has named her Lucy for herself. I went in to see her last week and