“You’re quite welcome. Laws, but your eyes is like your ma’s. She could just
about talk with hers. Your father was sorter homely but awful nice. I mind
hearing folks say when they was married that there never was two people more
in love with each other—Pore creatures, they didn’t live much longer; but they
was awful happy while they was alive, and I s’pose that counts for a good deal.”
Anne longed to get home to read her precious letters; but she made one little
pilgrimage first. She went alone to the green corner of the “old” Bolingbroke
cemetery where her father and mother were buried, and left on their grave the
white flowers she carried. Then she hastened back to Mount Holly, shut herself
up in her room, and read the letters. Some were written by her father, some by
her mother. There were not many—only a dozen in all—for Walter and Bertha
Shirley had not been often separated during their courtship. The letters were
yellow and faded and dim, blurred with the touch of passing years. No profound
words of wisdom were traced on the stained and wrinkled pages, but only lines
of love and trust. The sweetness of forgotten things clung to them—the far-off,
fond imaginings of those long-dead lovers. Bertha Shirley had possessed the gift
of writing letters which embodied the charming personality of the writer in
words and thoughts that retained their beauty and fragrance after the lapse of
time. The letters were tender, intimate, sacred. To Anne, the sweetest of all was
the one written after her birth to the father on a brief absence. It was full of a
proud young mother’s accounts of “baby”—her cleverness, her brightness, her
thousand sweetnesses.
“I love her best when she is asleep and better still when she is awake,” Bertha
Shirley had written in the postscript. Probably it was the last sentence she had
ever penned. The end was very near for her.
“This has been the most beautiful day of my life,” Anne said to Phil that night.
“I’ve FOUND my father and mother. Those letters have made them REAL to
me. I’m not an orphan any longer. I feel as if I had opened a book and found
roses of yesterday, sweet and beloved, between its leaves.”