She wanted to see you. But I would not let her. I felt it would be a catastrophe for you at your time of life. Your big photograph taken in your graduating dress was on the desk and I showed it to her, and finally gave it to her. You wondered what had become of it and I had to make up a story about something being the matter with the frame till I could get another.

She went away sobbing, and I have never forgotten it. When I have looked at you, and thought of her, I have felt like a criminal. I ought to have let her see you. I had no right to come between a mother and her child, no matter what she may have been, although she seemed quite lovely and respectable.

And now that I am about to die, I feel that I should leave behind me this information so that you may do what you wish in the matter. Perhaps you will want to do something for your own mother. You will have quite a fortune, my dear, and you are free to do what you wish with it, of course.

After your mother had gone away I sent her quite a generous check, but she returned it by the next mail and sent with it also the amount of money which your father—which my husband—had given your own father. I felt quite badly about that. It seemed to put me very much in the debt of your parents.

But now I am leaving the matter in your hands, my dear, and if you feel there is anything you would like to do, or if you want to grant your mother’s wish to see you, I want you to know that I am willing. I think perhaps I have sinned in this matter, and I want to make it right if I can. So I am giving you your mother’s name and address. Do whatever your heart dictates.

You already know how much I have loved you, how I love you as my own, and so I need not say it again. If you feel, dear child, that I have done wrong, I beg you to forgive me, for I have loved you greatly, and I have tried to do my best for you in every other way.

Your loving mother,

May D. Wetherill

Below was an address in an eastern city:

Mrs. John Gay, 1465 Aster Street

And below that, in pencil, had been written uncertainly as if with an idea of erasing it:

The name by which they called you was Dorothy.

So then she was no longer Marjorie Wetherill but Dorothy Gay. How strange and fantastic life was turning out to be!

She bowed her head on the letter and wept. First for the only mother she had known, and then for the mother she had not known. How pitiful it all seemed! So many little babies in the world without homes, and yet she should have been loved so intensely by two mothers!

Her heart burned for the mother she had always known, whose conscience had troubled her, and then ached for the other mother who wanted her and might not have her! What a strange world, and a strange happening, that this should come to her! That suddenly her safe, secure world should crumble all about her, death and change and perplexity staring her in the face.

And yet, she didn’t have to pay any attention to this letter. Nobody but herself knew of it. She could go right on living her life apart from them, living in this lovely home that the Wetherills had left her, forgetting her birth family, as she had always done. They had practically sold her out of their lives, hadn’t they? They had no real claim upon her. And, of course, they might be embarrassing! There was no telling what they were. She had nothing to give her a clue to what they were, except that her mother’s eyes were like hers.

Then suddenly a thrill came to her heart. But they were her very own, whatever they were! How wonderful that would be! And her mother had wanted her, enough to come a long distance to see her!

All the rest of the day the thought of her birth mother hovered in her mind and grew into a great longing to go to her; yet somehow it seemed disloyalty to the mother and father who had brought her up and had chosen to keep her in ignorance of her birth family.

It was not until she had read Mrs. Wetherill’s letter over carefully several times that she began to see that the letter really was a permission, if not even a plea, for her to do something about her birth family. As she began to read more and more between the lines of the letter, she felt that there was something demanded of her as a daughter that she should have done long ago.

That night she could not sleep and lay staring about in the darkness of her room—the room that Mrs. Wetherill had made so beautiful for her—realizing how safe and sweet and quiet it all was here, and how many complications there might be if she broke the long silence between herself and her own family.