This cry from the Past went to her heart like a knife. The wind, strengthening for a moment, moved the window curtains, bringing with it the drowsy afternoon sounds of Charleston, sounds that seemed to mock at this voice declaring the deathlessness of its love. It was impossible to go on reading. Impossible to expose any more this heart that had ceased to beat.
The meetings in the arbour behind the magnolia tree, the kisses, the words that the leaves and birds alone could hear--they had all ended in death.
It did not matter now if the garden gate creaked on its hinges, or if watching eyes from the piazza saw the glossy leaves stirring when no wind could shake them--nothing mattered at all to these people now.
She put all the letters back in the bureau, carefully closing them in the secret drawer.
"Miss Pinckney," said Phyl that night as they sat at supper, "when you left me this afternoon in Juliet's room I stopped to look at the books and things and when I opened the bureau I touched a spring by accident and a little panel fell out and I found a lot of old letters behind it. It was wrong of me to go meddling about and I thought I ought to tell you."
"Old letters," said Miss Pinckney, "you don't say--what were they about?"
"I read one or two," said the girl. "I'd never, never have dreamed of touching them only--only they were hers--they were to him."
"He kept all her letters," said she, "and they came back to her after he was killed. He was killed here in Charleston, at Fort Sumter, in the war; they brought him across here and carried him on a stretcher and she--well, well, it's all done with and let it rest, but it is strange that those letters should have fallen into your hands."
"Why?" burst out Miss Pinckney. "Why I have dusted that old bureau inside and out a hundred times, and pulled out the drawers and pushed them in and it never shewed sign of having anything in it but emptiness, and you don't do more'n look at it and you find those letters. It's just as if the thing had deceived me. I don't mind, and I don't want to see them, they weren't intended for other eyes than his and hers--and maybe yours since they were shewn you like that."
"Was it wrong of me to look at them?" asked Phyl. "I never would have done it only--only--Oh, I don't know, I somehow felt she wouldn't mind. She seemed like a sister--I would never dream of looking at another person's letters but she did not seem like another person. I can't explain. It was just as though the letters were my own--just exactly as though they were my own when I found them in my hands."