Yes: it was. He had been called in that very evening to prescribe for some access of illness in old Madame Kint; he was the second gentleman present in the salle-à-manger when I entered.
"Was it my letter, Lucy?"
"Your own: yours--the letter you wrote to me. I had come here to read it quietly. I could not find another spot where it was possible to have it to myself. I had saved it all day--never opened it till this evening: it was scarcely glanced over: I cannot bear to lose it. Oh, my letter!"
"Hush! don't cry and distress yourself so cruelly. What is it worth? Hush! Come out of this cold room; they are going to send for the police now to examine further: we need not stay here--come, we will go down."
A warm hand, taking my cold fingers, led me down to a room where there was a fire. Dr. John and I sat before the stove. He talked to me and soothed me with unutterable goodness, promising me twenty letters for the one lost. If there are words and wrongs like knives, whose deep- inflicted lacerations never heal--cutting injuries and insults of serrated and poison-dripping edge--so, too, there are consolations of tone too fine for the ear not fondly and for ever to retain their echo: caressing kindnesses--loved, lingered over through a whole life, recalled with unfaded tenderness, and answering the call with undimmed shine, out of that raven cloud foreshadowing Death himself. I have been told since that Dr. Bretton was not nearly so perfect as I thought him: that his actual character lacked the depth, height, compass, and endurance it possessed in my creed. I don't know: he was as good to me as the well is to the parched wayfarer--as the sun to the shivering jailbird. I remember him heroic. Heroic at this moment will I hold him to be.
He asked me, smiling, why I cared for his letter so very much. I thought, but did not say, that I prized it like the blood in my veins. I only answered that I had so few letters to care for.
"I am sure you did not read it," said he; "or you would think nothing of it!"
"I read it, but only once. I want to read it again. I am sorry it is lost." And I could not help weeping afresh.
"Lucy, Lucy, my poor little god-sister (if there be such a relationship), here--here is your letter. Why is it not better worth such tears, and such tenderly exaggerating faith?"
Curious, characteristic manoeuvre! His quick eye had seen the letter on the floor where I sought it; his hand, as quick, had snatched it up. He had hidden it in his waistcoat pocket. If my trouble had wrought with a whit less stress and reality, I doubt whether he would ever have acknowledged or restored it. Tears of temperature one degree cooler than those I shed would only have amused Dr. John.