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Felix had run across the letters by chance one Sunday afternoon, when he had been left alone in charge of his mother. The invalid had asked him to get a certain sweater of Sheilah's to put over her shoulders. She told Felix she thought Sheilah kept it in a drawer in her closet. Felix opened every drawer, and finally every box in the closet (the invalid insisting no other sweater would do) before he found the desired article hanging over the back of a chair in his mother's room.

Later he went back to Sheilah's closet, and carefully replaced everything he had disarranged. It was then that he found the packet of letters. He didn't read them all—only the first two or three, because he was afraid Sheilah might return unexpectedly. He tied them up just as he had found them, in the same order with the same small bow-knot, and laid them back where he supposed they had lain before—underneath the India shawl.

The full truth had dawned upon Felix for the first time that afternoon. Of course he had known Roger Dallinger and Sheilah liked each other. But he supposed it was just as friends. Felix was painfully aware of his own shortcomings, and of how miserably he had failed to give Sheilah what she ought to have. It had seemed to him ungenerous to begrudge her the pleasure she got in the companionship of a man