Then he sat down again, the taper at his elbow, Mistress Winthrop looking on, facing him across the top of the secretaire, and he took up the package.
The ribbon came away easily, and some half-dozen sheets fell out and scattered upon the desk.

They gave out a curious perfume, half of age, half of some essence with which years ago they had been imbued.
Something took Mr.Caryll in the throat, and he could never explain whether it was that perfume or some premonitory emotion, some prophetic apprehension of what he was about to see.
He opened the first of those folded sheets, and found it to be a letter written in French and in an ink that had paled to yellow with the years that were gone since it had been penned.

The fine, pointed writing was curiously familiar to Mr.Caryll.He looked at the signature at the bottom of the page.

It swam before his eyes--ANTOINETTE-"Celle qui l'adore, Antoinette," he read, and the whole world seemed blotted out for him; all consciousness, his whole being, his every sense, seemed concentrated into his eyes as they gazed upon that relic of a deluded woman's dream.
He did not read.

It was not for him to commit the sacrilege of reading what that girl who had been his mother had written thirty years ago to the man she loved--the man who had proved false as hell.
He turned the other letters over; opened them one by one, to make sure that they were of the same nature as the first, and what time he did so he found himself speculating upon the strangeness of Ostermore's having so treasured them.