toward me and said:

— Jim! Don't talk like that!

And it came to me that you did not want me to pour out all that was in me, so I opened my arms, knowing these were the last moments we would spend together. You hid yourself against my chest, and through your tears you said to me:

— Till we meet again, my dear.

•

The next day I wrote you a "formal" letter to thank you for your invitation, saying in it that I understood perfectly if you found no time to write. I waited a week for an answer and received nothing. The weeks passed, and nothing was left me of you but the memory.

My employers sent me to Chicago. The company flourished. The dream of sending music over the waves of the air moved along the road to fulfillment. My circum-stances improved, so my mother left her sewing work and came to live with me.

•

Do you remember, beloved?

The years have passed — twenty-six full years. Tomorrow we celebrate the passing of twenty years since our marriage, because in the end I came back and found you! We met by chance on "Bart" Street, and I saw — once more — the golden motes in your eyes.. There in the street I began repeating in your hearing the

sentence I had said to you on the station platform:

— If it should happen one day that you think of me, will you remember....

But you interrupted me and stretched out your arms to me — and I imagined that half the people in the town were looking at us — and you said:

— I remember perfectly, dear Jim, that I love you!

And we embraced. In the street there was an organ, one of those machines that fill the air with the ugliest kinds of music, but to us it was like the sweetest of Schubert's songs.

And today, my darling! You are wearing yourself out with worry over our daughter "Betty," and you fret as your mother used to fret over you. Our daughter is eighteen years old, and we believe she loves

"Bill McKim." I beg you not to be too hard on this young man. You may decide something after you have read in these lines the story of us two. It is my gift to you on the day of our anniversary. I shall leave it now in your room, where you sleep.

Would it be possible for us to invite "Bill" to the dinner party we are giving at the club? It may happen that he feels himself a stranger in the presence of a man who has won the "Pulitzer" Prize, and a woman who is a deputy in the legislature, and the rest of our "great" guests. It may happen that he wears a hired "dinner jacket" and is unable to say what ought to be said.

But long ago you invited a young man of poor circumstances to the dance at the university where you were studying....

Do you remember, my darling???