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There was a sound as of settling coal. Only at night would one
expect to hear so slight a sound as that in a tenement full of noisy
children. But the moment chanced to be propitious, and it not only
attracted the attention of Sweetwater on his side of the wall, but
it struck the ear of Brotherson also. With an ejaculation as bitter
as it was impatient, he roused himself and gathered up the letters.
Sweetwater could hear the successive rustlings as he bundled them
up in his hand. Then came another silence - then the lifting of a
stove lid.
Sweetwater had not been wrong in his secret apprehension. His
identification with his unimpressionable neighbour's mood had shown
him what to expect. These letters - these innocent and precious
outpourings of a rare and womanly soul - the only conceivable open
sesame to the hard-locked nature he found himself pitted against,
would soon be resolved into a vanishing puff of smoke.
But the lid was thrust back, and the letters remained in hand.
Mortal strength has its limits. Even Brotherson could not shut
down that lid on words which might have been meant for him, harshly
as he had repelled the idea.
The pause which followed told little; but when Sweetwater heard the
man within move with characteristic energy to the door, turn the
key and step back again to his place at the table, he knew that
the danger moment had passed and that those letters were about to
be read, not casually, but seriously, as indeed their contents
merited.
This caused Sweetwater to feel serious himself. Upon what result
might he calculate? What would happen to this hardy soul, when the
fact he so scornfully repudiated, was borne in upon him, and he saw
that the disdain which had antagonised him was a mere device - a
cloak to hide the secret heart of love and eager womanly devotion?
Her death - little as Brotherson would believe it up till now - had
been his personal loss the greatest which can befall a man. When
he came to see this - when the modest fervour of her unusual nature
began to dawn upon him in these self-revelations, would the result
be remorse, or just the deadening and final extinction of whatever
tenderness he may have retained for her memory?
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