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.