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NEW YORK, Nov. 16, 1894.

DEAR MIRIAM,—I asked you to write me soon, and yet you’ve kept me waiting ten days again. Even now your letter has come I can’t seem to get any satisfaction out of it. I have never known you to write so stiffly. Is there anything the matter? Are you worried at home? Is your mother sick or your father?

I wish I could get away for a week at Thanksgiving to run up and see you. But we are kept pretty busy at the store. There isn’t one of the firm hasn’t got his nose down to the grindstone, and that’s where they keep ours. That’s how they’ve made their money; it’s all good training for me, of course.

All the same I’d like to be with you this Thanksgiving, even if it isn’t as beautiful a day as last Thanksgiving was. I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a dinner as I did your mother’s that night, but I guess it wasn’t the turkey I liked so much or the pumpkin pie, but the welcome I got and the sight of the girl who sat opposite to me and who wouldn’t tell me what she had wished for when we pulled the wishbone. I think it was only that morning in church when I looked across and saw you at the organ that I found out I had been in love with you for a long while. You were so graceful, as you sat there and the sunlight came down on your beautiful brown hair, that I wanted to get up and go over on the spot and tell you I loved you. Then at dinner your fiery eyes seemed to burn right into me, and I wondered if you could see into my heart that was just full of love of you.

It is curious, isn’t it, that I didn’t get a chance to tell you all these things for nearly six months? I don’t know how it was, but first one thing and then another made me put off asking you. I was afraid, too. I dreaded to have you say you didn’t care for me. And you were always so independent with me. I couldn’t guess what your real feelings were. Then came that day in June when I mustered up courage at last! Since then I’ve been a different man—a better man, I hope, too.

But I don’t know why I should write you this way in answer to a letter of yours that was too short almost to be worth the postage!

JACK.