belongings, for she was a woman of sentiment, and she felt the child
should not be parted from this gift of his dying mother. But at length,
when a knowledge of writing made it possible for him to read the
letters, he was possessed with a feeling of shrinking from doing so, as
one might shrink from opening a message from the grave.

What grim, what terrible secrets, might not the little bundle of letters
reveal!

It was not until his fifth and last year at Stoke-Newington that Edgar
decided one day to look into the packet. He was confined to his bed by
slight indisposition and so had the dormitory to himself and could risk
opening the letters without fear of interruption. He untied the blue
ribbon and the thin, yellowed papers, with fragments of their broken
seals still sticking to them, fell apart. He picked up the one bearing
the earliest date and began to read. It was from his father to his
mother immediately after their betrothal. His interest was at once
intensely aroused and in the order in which the letters came, he read,
and read, and read, with the absorption with which he might have read
his first novel. They were a revelation to him--a revelation of a world
he had not known existed, though it seemed, it lay roundabout him--these
love-letters of his parents, literally throbbing with the exalted
passion of two young, ardent, poetic spirits. The boy had not dreamed
that anything so beautiful could be as this undying love of which they
wrote and the language in which they made their sweet vows to each
other. His own heart throbbed in answer to what he read. His imagination
was violently wrought upon and exquisite feelings such as he had never
known before awakened in his breast.

Under the spell of the letters the child-poet fell in love--not with any