BY FRANCES NOYES HART
From Pictorial Review
The first time she heard it was in the silk-hung and flower-scented peace of the little
drawing-room in Curzon Street. His sister Rosemary had wanted to come up to London
to get some clothes--Victory clothes they called them in those first joyous months after
the armistice, and decked their bodies in scarlet and silver, even when their poor hearts
went in black--and Janet had been urged to leave her own drab boarding-house room to
stay with the forlorn small butterfly. They had struggled through dinner somehow, and
Janet had finished her coffee and turned the great chair so that she could watch the
dancing fire (it was cool for May), her cloudy brown head tilted back against the rose-red
cushion, shadowy eyes half closed, idle hands linked across her knees. She looked every
one of her thirty years--and mortally tired--and careless of both facts. But she managed
an encouraging smile at the sound of Rosemary's shy, friendly voice at her elbow. "Janet,
these are yours, aren't they? Mummy found them with some things last week, and I
thought that you might like to have them."
She drew a quick breath at the sight of the shabby packet.
"Why, yes," she said evenly. "That's good of you, Rosemary. Thanks a lot."
"That's all right," murmured Rosemary diffidently. "Wouldn't you like something to read?
There's a most frightfully exciting Western novel----"
The smile took on a slightly ironical edge. "Don't bother about me, my dear. You see, I
come from that frightfully exciting West, and I know all about the pet rattlesnakes and
the wildly Bohemian cowboys. Run along and play with your book--I'll be off to bed in a
few minutes."
Rosemary retired obediently to the deep chair in the corner, and with the smile gone but
the irony still hovering, she slipped the cord off the packet. A meager and sorry enough
array--words had never been for her the swift, docile servitors that most people found
them. But the thin gray sheet in her fingers started out gallantly enough--"Beloved."
Beloved! She leaned far forward, dropping it with deft precision into the glowing pocket
of embers. What next? This was more like--it began "Dear Captain Langdon" in the
small, contained, even writing that was her pride, and it went on soberly enough, "I shall
be glad to have tea with you next Friday--not Thursday, because I must be at the hut then.
It was stupid of me to have forgotten you--next time I will try to do better." Well, she had
done better the next time. She had not forgotten him again--never, never again. That had
been her first letter; how absurd of Jerry, the magnificently careless, to have treasured it
all that time, the miserable, stilted little thing! She touched it with curious fingers. Surely,
surely he must have cared, to have cared so much for that!
