hands solemnly across the tea-table again, and wished him
happiness--which was sincere enough, but hopeless--and said we
had only been playing a game, but that it was time to stop
playing. Jim kissed my hand, and it was really very touching.

We had been the best of friends ever since. Two days before the
wedding he came around from his tailor's, and we burned all his
letters to me. He would read one and say: "Here's a crackerjack,
Kit," and pass it to me. And after I had read it we would lay it
on the firelog, and Jim would say, "I am not worthy of her, Kit.
I wonder if I can make her happy?" Or--"Did you know that the
Duke of Belford proposed to her in London last winter?"

Of course, one has to take the woman's word about a thing like
that, but the Duke of Belford had been mad about Maude Richard
all that winter.

You can see that the burning of the letters, which was meant to
be reminiscently sentimental, a sort of how-silly-we-were-but-
it-is-all-over-now occasion, became actually a two hours' eulogy
of Bella. And just when I was bored to death, the Mercer girls
dropped in and heard Jim begin to read one commencing "dearest Kit."
And the next day after the rehearsal dinner, they told Bella!

There was very nearly no wedding at all. Bella came to see me in
a frenzy the next morning and threw Jim and his two-hundred odd
pounds in my face, and although I explained it all over and over,
she never quite forgave me. That was what made it so hard
later--the situation would have been bad enough without that
complication.