The last words had come faintly through stiffened white lips, for her labor at packing and the emotional strain of talking to me concerning the future had brought on one of the dreaded heart attacks which were so terribly frequent in the last weeks of her life. We had never spoken of the matter afterward, for she did not leave her bed again until the end.
At one time she had motioned me to bring from her desk the old-fashioned key ring on which she kept her keys. She had held up two, a tiny key and a larger one, and whispered hoarsely: "These keys are the keys to the lock box and the little trunk--you know where the others belong." Then she had closed her eyes, as if the effort of speaking had exhausted her, as indeed it had.
In the wild grief which followed my mother's death there was no thought of my unknown father except the bitterness I had always felt toward him. I knew that the terrible sorrow he had caused my mother had helped to shorten her life, and my heart was hot with anger against him.
I had never opened the trunk since her death. The exciting, almost tragic experiences of my life with Dicky had swept all the old days into the background. I could not analyze the change that had come over me. As I lifted the lid of the trunk and took from the top tray the inlaid box which my mother's hands had last touched, my grief for her was mingled with a strange new longing to find out anything I could concerning the father I had never known.
The superscription on the envelope which I held in my hand stared up at me with all the sentience of a living thing. The letters were in the crabbed, trembling, old-fashioned handwriting of my mother--the last words that she had ever written. It was as if she had come back from the dead to talk to me.
With the memory of my mother's advice, I hesitated for a long time before breaking the seal. With the letters pressed close against my tear-wet cheeks I sat for a long time, busy with memories of my mother and debating whether or not I had the right to open the letter.
I certainly was not in desperate straits, and I could not conscientiously say that I no longer harbored any resentment toward^the father of whom I had no recollection. I felt that never in my life could I fully pardon the man who had made my mother suffer so terribly. But the longing to know something of my father, which I had felt since the coming into my life of Robert Gordon, had become almost an obsession, with me.