248
Kansas University Weekly.
with it now. Ye'd had hard work to a kept him from tearin' it up a year or so ago." And the the woman fingered the doll's dainty garments and smoothed the flaxen curls with her brown, work-hardened hand and her worn face lighted with pleasure at the beauty of the child's gift. It was well that her attention was so fully absorbed by Miss Dolly and that just then, she was called away and Sarah Jane was left alone with her birthday present. It was a wonderful doll, the most beautiful one she had seen but, yes, there was no doubt about the two bright drops that fell upon dolly's silken gown being tears and they came from Sarah Jane's eyes. She was crying over her doll. She was a good little girl and knew that she ought to be grateful for the gift. She wanted to be, but O dear! what her mother had said was true. She had longed for a doll once. With such a beauty as this she would have been the happiest child in the world two years ago. She could have loved it, when she was twelve. But now! The baby had grown, as her mother had said, but alas, so had Sarah Jane. She was thirteen and the finest gift she had ever had was only a disappointment, because it had come too late.
$$
\* \* \* \* \*
$$
Sarah Jane was forty,—an old woman, she thought as she looked into her mirror that bright September afternoon. But the face that looked out from the glass did not seem so very old after all. It was a face well worth a second glance, for it was calm, strong, sweet and sensible. There was not one freckle to be found now, there was hardly a wrinkle unless one looked very closely. There was just a little look of weariness in the eyes,—grey eyes now, but how can one be forty and not bear some sign of the years? Sarah Jane turned from the mirror with a sigh, surely not because the picture she saw displeased but because, modest woman that she was, she saw the comeliness that would have meant so much more once than it could ever mean now.
On her little parlor table she found a bunch of magnificent roses. Had some one remembered her birthday, now, when she was forty?
She took up the note which lay by the flowers, opened it and glanced at the signature. Frederick Mills—she knew him well. It was more than a year since he came back, a very successful man, people said. She had seen him often but he had never written before. She sat down and read the note. She read it again, and yet again. Then she sat very still, thinking, thinking of the cheerless girlhood of hard work that had given no time for youthful pleasures or girlish friendships, and of the girl who had been too plain and awkward to take any great part in the few frolics that fell to her lot and too shy to make friends among those who came her way. She remembered the few, the very few times that Fred Mills had sat in the cheerless "front room" with this same shy, homely girl who could do scarcely more than stammer and blush to entertain him. No wonder he had not come oftener. Then she thought of her young womanhood, of the time when changes had come, and she had first realized the possibility of planning and living her own life in her own way, of the opportunities long deferred, but finally accepted and improved, of the days and years spent in becoming what she was to-day, a busy, useful, contented woman.
And this was her first love letter, her very first, and she was forty.
Of course there was but one answer to send now, it might have been different even ten years ago. She was a foolish old woman, perhaps, but she would keep her—her love letter just because it was her first and only one.
Two bright drops fell upon the paper as she took from the table one of the largest and most perfect of the roses. Then she went to her desk, to a little drawer that was not often opened, and in it she placed the letter and the rose. Of course, it was quite by chance that the white paper with the crimson petals pressed against it, lay upon the flaxen hair of a doll, her birthday gift when she was thirteen.
MARY E. FROST.
Prof. Munsterberg, the leading experimental psychologist of Germany, has accepted the chair of Psychology at Harvard. Ariel.