His letters were brief, dispirited, and infrequent, but they had not
ceased altogether till within the last few months, during which
Letty's to him had been returned from Boston with "Not found"
scribbled on the envelopes.

The firm in whose care Letty had latterly addressed him simply wrote,
in answer to her inquiries, that Mr. Gilman had not been in their
employ for some time and they had no idea of his whereabouts.

The rest was silence.




[Illustration]

V


A good deal of water had run under Beulah Bridge since Letty Boynton
had sat at her window on a December evening unconsciously furnishing
copy and illustration for a Christmas card; yet there had been very
few outward changes in the village. Winter had melted into spring,
burst into summer, faded into autumn, lapsed into winter again,--the
same old, ever-recurring pageant in the world of Nature, and the same
procession of incidents in the neighborhood life.

The harvest moon and the hunter's moon had come and gone; the first
frost, the family dinners and reunions at Thanksgiving, the first
snowfall; and now, as Christmas approached, the same holiday spirit