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“Dearest dear, do I dare say it, love of my life? You are leaving tomorrow and will not return until long after Christmas. Your engagement has been announced to someone already in Paris, waiting. I wish you a grand life and a happy one and many children. Forget my name. Forget it? Why, dear girl, you never knew it. Willie or Will? I think you called me that. But there was no last name, really, so nothing to forget. Remember instead my love. Signed W.R.F.”
Finished, he sat back and opened his eyes as she folded the letter and placed it with the others in her lap, tears running down her cheeks.
“Why,” she asked at last, “did you steal the letters? And use them this way, sixty years later? Who told you where the letters might be? I buried them in that coffin, that trunk, when I sailed to France. I don’t think I have looked at them more than once in the past thirty years. Did William Ross Fielding tell you about them?”
“Why, dear girl, haven’t you guessed?” said the old man. “My Lord, I am William Ross Fielding.”
There was an incredibly long silence.
“Let me look at you.” Emily leaned forward as he raised his head into the light.
“No,” she said. “I wish I could say. Nothing.”
“It’s an old man’s face now,” he said. “No matter. When you sailed around the world one way, I went another. I have lived in many countries and done many things, a bachelor traveling. When I heard that you had no children and that your husband died, many years ago, I drifted back to this, my grandparents’ house. It has taken all these years to nerve myself to find and send this best part of my life to you.”
The two sisters were very still. You could almost hear their hearts beating. The old man said:
“What now?”
“Why,” said Emily Bernice Watriss Wilkes slowly, “every day for the next two weeks, send the rest of the letters. One by one.”
He looked at her, steadily.
“And then?” he said.
“Oh, God!” she said. “I don’t know. Let’s see.”
“Yes, yes. Indeed. Let’s say good-bye.”
Opening the front door he almost touched her hand.
“My dear dearest Emily,” he said.
“Yes?” She waited.
“What—” he said.
“Yes?” she said.
“What …” he said, and swallowed. “What … are you …”
She waited.
“Doing tonight?” he finished, quickly.
Remember Me?
“Remember me? Of course, surely you do!”
His hand extended, the stranger waited.
“Why, yes,” I said. “You’re—”
I stopped and searched around for help. We were in middle-street in Florence, Italy, at high noon. He had been rushing one way, I the other, and almost collided. Now he waited to hear his name off my lips. Panicking, I rummaged my brain which ran on empty.
“You’re—” I said again.
He seized my hand as if fearing I might bolt and run. His face was a sunburst. He knew me! Shouldn’t I return the honor? There’s a good dog, he thought, speak!
